Teaching Collocations through Task-Based Instruction: The Case of Iranian EFL Students

Abstract

With regard to the recent importance of vocabulary teaching, this study is going to investigate the effect of task-based instruction on acquiring collocations. Moreover, it seeks to investigate the role of form-focused and collaborative tasks in acquiring collocations. To this end, intermediate learners of English were selected via a placement test. A pretest which attempted to determine their collocational knowledge was taken. Then the collocations were taught along with their regular instruction related to four skills of listening, reading, speaking, and writing. At the end of the term, the posttest was given to examine the participants' achievement. Consequently, paired sample t-test was applied to analyze the collected data, and the significant differences between pre/posttest revealed that task-based instruction is an effective approach that can contribute to learning English collocations by Iranian EFL learners.