Developing collocational awareness

This study aimed to investigate to what extent explicit instruction of vocabulary in collocations, using different techniques, develops collocational awareness in students, and whether such instruction has any enhancing effect on the retention of vocabulary. Eight intact groups of 160 EFL students of upper-intermediate proficiency level under the supervision of their regular course teachers participated in this study. Four of the groups were assigned as the experimental group and received vocabulary instruction focusing on collocations, while the remaining four were assigned as the control group and received instruction concentrating on single words. For this investigation, a vocabulary retention test , which was administered as the pre-and post-test, three tasks for the three treatment sessions, transcriptions of verbal processes of one of the experimental groups, and retrospective interviews with the participant instructors were used as data collection devices. The analyses of the qualitative data showed that the participants developed awareness to the extent that they could identify collocations in any text and categorize lexical collocations. The analyses of the quantitative data revealed that vocabulary instruction in collocations yielded far better results in terms of vocabulary retention. In the light of the findings of this study, explicit instruction of vocabulary in collocations, using different techniques, is highly recommended for developing collocational competence and better retention of vocabulary.