The Impact of the explicit teaching of lexical and grammatical collocations on EFL students’ writing production
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Date
2019
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Publisher
University Of Oum El Bouaghi
Abstract
The present study aims at investigating the effect of teaching collocations on improving the writing production of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners. Data for this study were collected from forty second year English LMD students at L'arbi Ben Mhidi University. In this study, it is hypothesized that the explicit teaching of lexical and grammatical collocations
would improve students' writing production. In order to test this hypothesis, twenty participants were assigned to the control group while the other twenty made the experimental group. A writing task was administered as a pretest to examine the learners' writing production and to measure their collocational knowledge through their writing. The results of the pretest of both groups showed a low performance in writing production including a limited knowledge of collocations. Afterwards, an explicit instruction of collocations was carried out with the experimental group class as an attempt to increase the students' collocational knowledge for the purpose of improving their writing production. After the treatment, a posttest was conducted with both the experimental and control groups. The results of the paired sample t test showed that the group who received explicit collocation task-based instruction outperformed the control group in the posttest, the experimental group's scores of
writing were remarkably higher than the control group's scores. This implies that the explicit teaching of collocations helped the students to use collocations more accurately and naturally in their writings. Therefore, the final results of the experiment proved the effectiveness of collocation teaching in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) writing classrooms.
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Keywords
Grammatical collocation, Writing production