Deliberate teaching of collocations - an intervention study of Czech upper-intermediate EFL students
Abstract
Collocation knowledge is claimed to be poor even among upper-intermediate and advanced learners of English as a second language, which implies that not enough attention is being drawn to these lexical items in lessons. To address this problem, we designed a 12-week teaching intervention in which the participants (39 students of Charles University in Prague) were divided into two groups: an experimental group with an intensive explicit collocation focus (20) and a control group with no such care dedicated to collocations in the input given (19).
The division of the students was made in such a way that the groups were equal in terms of the variables which tend to influence the learning process the most, namely language aptitude, anxiety, motivation, and learning strategies. The results showed that the experimental group achieved significantly higher scores for collocation knowledge.
No significant difference was found between the groups in understanding of word meanings. Deliberate teaching of collocations with systematic revision and practice thus proved to be more effective than meaning-focused teaching of individual words.