چکیده:
There is insufficient rigorous research examining which features of EFL/ESL learners’ writing can be improved through their awareness/knowledge of collocation. This study, therefore, addressed this issue and examined the effect of this awareness on Iranian EFL learners’ writing performance with respect to the specific features of each writing sub-component (i.e., content, organization, vocabulary and language use) in the short and long term. The study was a quasi-experimental using a within- and between-group approach utilizing a pre-test/post-test design with a control group supplemented with the qualitative information obtained from the interviews with the writing raters. The results showed that developing knowledge/awareness of collocations effectively improved the participants’ quality of writing in terms of ‘vocabulary’, ‘organization’ and ‘language use’. A deeper analysis of the results revealed that the observed improvements in these sub-components were in terms of some particular features: the range of sophistication, lexical choice and usage; succinctness, fluency and clarity of the expressed ideas; and the accuracy of agreement, tense and prepositions. In addition, the sub-findings emerging from the results accentuated the significance of instructional intervention, in general, and first language-second language contrastive analysis, in particular, in helping L2 learners notice, note and incorporate collocations in their output.
خلاصه ماشینی:
Keywords: Collocation, collocation awareness, writing proficiency, writing sub-components, first language-second language (L1-L2) contrastive analysis Introduction Upper-intermediate L2 learners, in general, and Iranian EFL learners, in particular, have been found to experience serious difficulties in using even the most common or already known words in their written production (Namvar, Nor, Ibrahim, & Mustafa, 2012).
The scale comprises five ESL sub-components of writing– which help raters evaluate learners’ writing with respect to their: Content: development of thesis and relevance to the assigned topic, Organization: fluent expression; clearly stated/supported, succinct, well-organized, logically sequencing and cohesive presentation of ideas, Vocabulary: sophisticated range, effective word/idiom choice and usage, word form mastery, appropriate register, Language use: effective complex constructions, few errors of agreement, tense, number, word, order/function, articles, pronouns and prepositions, and Mechanics: mastery of conventions, few errors of spelling, punctuation, capitalization and paragraphing It is important to note that the researcher would not report the findings regarding the effect of teaching collocation on the use of mechanics in writing in the current research since such an effect does not sound justifiable and cannot be expected.
’s (2013) conducted studies on Iranian EFL learners and that of the present research regarding the positive effect of collocation instruction on the 'vocabulary' sub- scale, these findings differ with respect to the other sub-constructs of writing.
The results of these studies indicated that although the employed treatments for teaching collocation could help the learners to produce more correct collocations, they did not effect any significant changes in the learners’ writing performance at the post-test stage.