Deliberate Teaching of Collocations – an Intervention Study of Czech Upper-Intermediate EFL Students

Abstract

Collocation knowledge is claimed to be poor even among upper-intermediate and advanced learners of English as a second language, which implies that not enough attention is being drawn to these lexical items in lessons. To address this problem, we designed a 12-week teaching intervention in which the participants (39 students of Charles University in Prague) were divided into two groups: an experimental group with an intensive explicit collocation focus (20) and a control group with no such care dedicated to collocations (19). Th e division of the students was performed in such a way that the groups were equal in terms of the variables which tend to infl uence the learning process the most, namely language aptitude, anxiety, motivation, and learning strategies. Th e results showed that the experimental group achieved signifi cantly higher scores for collocation knowledge. No signifi cant diff erence was found between the groups in understanding of word meanings. Deliberate teaching of collocations with systematic revision and practice thus proved to be more eff ective than meaning-focused teaching of individual words.

Keywords

• teaching intervention
• collocations
• explicit teaching
• SLA
• anxiety
• motivation