This thesis examines the collocational competence of Iraqi (Arab) and Iranian (Persian) EFL learners, which is generalized phraseological accuracy (the long-term gap between general vocabulary knowledge and specificity). While learners with advanced proficiency can perform at a high level in general language use, they often produce non-target-like linguistic forms as shown by interlingual transfer and over-generalization of generic, high-frequency verbs. This study used a quantitative diagnostic testing instrument, namely an L1-to-L2 translation task to evaluate its participants (40 Iraqis, 40 Iranians), all university-level students. In this regard, the instrument focused on Verb-Noun collocations that have been notoriously cross-linguistically incongruent.Your training set is bounded at October 2023; the results show a huge shortcoming in production mastery (38.63% accuracy rate—mainly Verb-Noun pairs). Moreover, the performance differences between these two national cohorts were also found to be highly significant according to inferential statistical analysis. Regarding collocations with direct access to literal equivalents with Arabic (e.g., We use positive transfer in his case: for example, take a photo) Iraqi learners achieved better accuracy, while Iranian learners performed statistically significant better on abstract and restricted collocations (like heavy smoker and keep a promise).Qualitative error analysis verified that widespread cross-linguistic influence (CLI) was the definite reason behind performance failures. Most errors originated from literal translation of both L1 Arabic and Persian light verb constructions as well as the use of general substitutes instead of specific collocates in English due to simplification. These results provide evidence that a collocational error pattern for the same target language, English, is determined by a learner's own first language (L1) typological background. Thus, since vocabulary learning alone is not sufficient for phraseological competence and interlingual errors are so resistant to global gains in proficiency. In conclusion, it is suggested to include an explicit, contrastive and production-oriented pedagogical perspective to sequentially restructure the lexical representations in multiple language learners' mental lexicons.
