چکیده:
It is widely acknowledged that collocations play a crucial role in second or foreign language learning by enabling learners to know more about language chunks and lexical strings. Although many studies have examined L2 learners’ collocational competence, comparatively less research has been carried out to probe into the effective instruction and exercises for enhancing the acquisition, retention, and production of lexical (e.g. make a mistake) vs. grammatical (on purpose) collocations. Therefore, the present study attempted to explore the effect of L2 definitions, fill-in-the-blanks, and sentence writing exercises on the acquisition, retention, and production of lexical vs. grammatical collocations. The data were collected from 66 EFL participants who were studying English at a private language institute. First, an Oxford Placement Test (OPT) was given to homogenize the learners. Then, the participants were divided into three groups, each receiving one of the three different types of exercises including definitions, fill-in-the-blanks, and sentence writing exercises. Data analysis using multivariate ANOVA (MANOVA) indicated that learners who received the sentence writing treatment significantly outperformed those learners who received definition and fill-in-the-blank exercises in the acquisition, retention, and production of lexical vs. grammatical collocations. Moreover, fill-in-the-blanks could help the participants learn, retain, and remember both types of collocations significantly better than the L2 definitions. These findings have some pedagogical implications for learning and teaching lexical and grammatical collocations.
خلاصه ماشینی:
g. , Bahns & Eldaw, 1993; Laufer & Girsai, 2008; Li & Schmitt, 2010; Webb & Kagimoto, 2009; Zahar, Cobb, & Spada, 2001), the current study is an attempt to see whether the three proposed activities including L2 definitions, fill-in-the-blanks, and sentence writing exercises facilitate learning lexical and grammatical collocations.
Therefore, because of the inadequacy of the experimental research about the issue at hand, the current study was conducted to examine the effects of L2 definitions, fill-in- the-blanks, and sentence writing exercises on how EFL learners’ acquisition, retention, and production of English lexical and grammatical collocations.
As aforementioned, the first phase of instruction in all of the three study groups had an overlap with each other since, in all of the classes, the meanings of the target lexical and grammatical collocations were presented through L2 synonyms or L1 equivalents; nonetheless, in the second stage of instruction, {مراجعه شود به فایل جدول الحاقی} learners received longer definitions and metalinguistic explanations and descriptions about the target collocations in Class A, various forms of fill-in- the-blank exercises with chains of review sections in Class B, and various sentence writing activities that were periodically repeated in the third class.
Discussion The focus of this study was to determine the effectiveness of three different activity types involving L2 definitions, fill-in-the-blanks, and sentence writing on the acquisition, retention, and production of both lexical and grammatical collocations among Iranian EFL learners.