Students' Familiarity with Metaphorical Collocations of time: A Preliminary Investigation

The present study attempted to investigate EFL students' familiarity with collocations of time (i.e., verb + time and time + noun) in the English language.  As many as 42 students were enrolled in this study as participants in which 23 participants were fifth-semester students and 19 were seventh-semester students. To collect the data, the questionnaire was designed and developed based on corpus search results in terms of the verb collocations (verb + time) and noun collocates (time + noun). The data were collected by distributing questionnaires confirming their familiarity with some setlists of time collocations. The results showed that most students are already familiar with many time collocations, either verb + time or time + noun combinations. However, some high-frequency collocations were less familiar among EFL learners. This result should be considered by introducing more intensively learners to English collocations, especially collocations of time.