students would, for example, have no difficulty producing the word diary when the meaning they wish to express requires it. They, however, have considerable difficulty in trying to figure out whether they should say *maintain a diary, *conduct a diary, or keep a diary?

This deficiency seems to be, to some extent, due to the lack of collocational knowledge among EFL learners, and to a large extent, the inadequate emphasis given to collocational patterns in their textbooks, and the type of instruction they receive. Bahns (1993) believes that when learners lack collocational knowledge, they resort to the L1 as the only resource, and thus perform well on those collocations that have L1 equals than on others. Lewis (2000) contends that EFL learners not only need to know what is right to say, but also what is wrong to say. Finding out the learners’ collocation