A test of five questions on two grammatical and three lexcial collocations of knowledge was given to 128 Chinese Culture University freshmen to understand the students' collocational competence. The results demonstrated that the participants had great difficulty producing acceptable English collocations. After a close analysis of the answers, the researcher discovered six causes of the difficulty. In the analysis, English-English dictionaries, dictionaries of collocations, and native speakers were consulted about the collocability of the answers. The paper ends with some suggestions about the teaching of collocations.
