The effects of different tasks on verb-noun collocation learning

Abstract

It has been widely recognized that much of our vocabulary consists of different kinds of prefabricated chunks, among which the single most important kind is collocation. Both native speakers of a language and successful advanced learners of a foreign language have a high level of collocational competence. However, most foreign language learners of English with intermediate language proficiency lack this collocational competence. Recent research has further indicated that mere exposure does not guarantee language acquisition for EFL learners. Effective learning integrates the concept of noticing and attention into a language course for collocational knowledge development, followed by post-reading activities to strengthen the form-meaning connections. The present study was designed to investigate the extent to which drawing EFL learners’ attention to the target collocations via textual enhancement techniques plus different post-reading activities would facilitate their receptive and productive knowledge of verb-noun collocations. Three tasks were included in this study: reading a text with L1 glossed and highlighted collocations; reading a text with L1 glossed and highlighted collocations followed by multiple-choice exercises; and finally reading a text with L1 glossed and highlighted collocations followed by fill-in-the-blanks activities. The results indicate that participants doing the second task outperformed those doing the other two tasks in terms of their receptive knowledge of form and meaning, but none of the productive knowledge was acquired with the three tasks. Implications are discussed at the end of the paper.