This paper uses a task-based approach in an attempt to investigate the availabilty and use of collocations in high school students studying French at an intermediate level. Collocations, i.e. arbitrarily restricted lexeme combinations, are assumed to play a major role in language processing and use. Collocations are generally thought to pose a challenge to second language learners as they often are language bound and idiosyncratic. For this purpose 45 high school students’ productive and receptive knowledge was tested, and the result of the testing was in turn compared to an essay-task. Consequently, the results showed that observed collocational knowledge was found to correlate with proficiency in written production. Finally the implications for teaching are discussed and a few areas of further research are proposed.