The Students’ Perceptions of the Involvement Load Hypothesis on Collocation Learning

Abstract

The purposes of the study were to explore the students’ perceptions of the Involvement Load Hypothesis (ILH) and to investigate the perceptions of their collocation learning under the ILH. The ILH is proposed by Laufer and Hulstijin (2001) claimed its effect on vocabulary learning and retention due to its elements of the hypothesis. Six first-year English major students studying in a university in Thailand took the semi-structured interviews. Prior to the interview, the students were asked to do collocation exercises developed based on the ILH. The students needed to study collocations in the learning materials which contained the sentence examples and a page of the collocation in the Oxford Collocation Dictionary to finish the exercises. The result revealed a positive perception of learning collocation based on the ILH. The discussion was made based on the students’ reflections on the ILH and collocation learning from the learning materials.

Keywords

• collocation
• perceptions
• the involvement load hypothesis
• collocation learning