The study investigated L2 learners' acquisition of verb‐noun and adjective‐noun collocations following two kinds of instruction: input flood only and input flood plus input enhancement (in the form of underlining). L1 Polish learners of English as a foreign language were exposed to infrequent collocations embedded in stories that were read during three consecutive weeks. Their collocational competence was subsequently assessed in a battery of delayed tests tapping into productive and receptive levels of collocational mastery. Input flood plus input enhancement resulted in the acquisition of collocations but only at the level of form recall and form recognition. The findings are discussed with reference to the complexity of acquiring and measuring L2 collocational knowledge. The article concludes with implications for instructed second language acquisition.

This explanatory research analyzes previous studies that have explored the benefits of using a corpus-based approach to teach English idiomatic expressions to lower-level students, namely verb + noun collocations. Secondary data, as well as collocational data extracted from online corpora was analyzed in order to discuss the advantages of using corpus and Data Driven Learning activities. A corpus-based approach has proven beneficial to increase students’ linguistic awareness and exposure to authentic language and real-life usage of collocations. Moreover, the extraction of the most frequent noun collocates for the verbs shed light to important pedagogical implications that are useful in the design of teaching material.

Krashen (1981, 1982, 1983) believed that the effects of explicit instruction are peripheral and explicit knowledge cannot be converted to implicit knowledge. Ellis (2002), on the other hand, maintained that form-focused or explicit instruction can contribute to the development of implicit knowledge. To test this controversial issue on learning English collocations, a study was conducted on teaching English collocations in three different modes, focus on meaning, focus on form, and focus on forms. The effects of instruction were measured by recognition and production tests one month after the instruction. The results of the study showed that the more explicit the instruction, the better the performance of learners on both recognition and production tests. The study also showed that, in the case of English collocations, explicit instruction is possible to contribute to the development of implicit knowledge.

Interests in examining the roles of receptive vocabulary knowledge and collocational knowledge and competence on EFL learners' proficiency have grown considerably; yet, the extent of how EFL learners' receptive knowledge of noun, verb-noun collocations, and noun-preposition collocations impact their English skill performances is still insufficiently researched. To address such gaps, this study specifically explored Thai EFL learners' receptive knowledge of nouns and collocations and its impact on English skill performances. Three types of receptive vocabulary tests were created by using high-frequency nouns taken from the Academic Vocabulary List (AVL), which became the basis of selecting verb-noun lexical collocations and noun-preposition grammatical collocations. The tests were validated by a pilot study, then distributed to the 2 nd year students (N = 135; 28 males; 107 females) at Walailak University, Thailand. The results of the tests were analyzed by using descriptive statistics, independent t-test, ANOVA, and multiple linear regressions. It was revealed that Thai EFL learners, who participated in this study, had insufficient knowledge of noun, either in form or in meaning, and encountered complexities in identifying lexical and grammatical collocations. Receptive knowledge significantly predicted learners' performance in reading tasks. The findings of this study indicate the urgent need to include collocations into English teaching as Thai EFL learners seem unable to acquire them on their own; besides, the insufficient knowledge of the form and meaning of nouns may imply a deeper problem in Thai EFL learners' proficiency in grammatical structure. Therefore, it is important to emphasize that English teaching and learning materials, e.g., textbooks and modules, as well as course design and instruction at the university level in Thailand need to include explicitly integrated lessons of nouns (form and meaning) and collocations to facilitate the development of knowledge in such areas.

Collocation is known as one of the most problematic areas in learning a second language and it seems that if one has tendency to improve his or her communication ability in another language, the elaboration of collocation using competence is among the most important issues. This study investigated the role of implicit input enhancement in teaching grammatical collocations for Iranian EFL learners. Two groups of Iranian intermediate EFL High School students in a language institute in Ardebil participated in this study. One group was assigned as control group and the other as experimental that received treatment sessions. A Twenty-item multiple choice pre-test was administrated at first for both control and experimental groups. 10 sessions of treatment through bolding the target grammatical collocations in the reading passages were provided for experimental group. Post-test was administrated for both control and experimental groups after treatment sessions. The scores of post-test were analyzed using t-test. The results of t-test showed that there was no significant difference between the two groups. The findings demonstrated that enhancing the collocational input is not significantly beneficial for EFL learners.

Teaching subject-matter courses using English as a medium of instruction (EMI) is gaining popularity in the English as a foreign language (EFL) context. In such courses, students usually have lower proficiency than international or English as a second language (ESL) learners studying in an English-speaking country. Additionally, EFL learners do not have as much exposure to English as ESL students have outside of the classroom, making the subject matter of EMI courses a greater challenge for them. Acquiring a large enough English vocabulary and basic grammar is a prerequisite to study successfully in such courses. Furthermore, knowledge of multi-word units, in addition to that of single words, is helpful because these “improve the quality and fluency of spoken and written language” (Laufer & Waldman, 2011, p. 648). Multi-word units have also been referred to as formulaic expressions, chunks, prefabricated patterns, collocations, and so forth. The importance and difficulty of acquirin...

Learning of English collocations has been found quite demanding for many language learners in general and for the Iranian EFL learners in particular. Recent second language educators have proposed two crucial perspectives for teaching collocations: the corpus-based view and the traditional methods. This study examined the mixed effects of explicit instruction, collaborative output, pushed output, corrective feedback, and visual input enhancement through a set of corpus-based instructional materials for the learning of English collocations. Using a quasi-experimental research design, the data were obtained through a pretest, a posttest, and a delayed posttest. Participants included 125 intermediate EFL students, who were assigned to 4 experimental (E1, E2, E3, and E4) groups and 1 control group (n = 25 for each group). Fifty collocations were selected as the teaching materials in both control and experimental groups. In experimental groups, the collocations were taught through a series of corpus-based materials, and the control group through a conventional method. The collected data were analysed through One-way ANOVA and some post hoc Scheffé tests. Results indicated that all the combined procedures had positive effects on the learning of the English collocations. Also, the results showed that all the experimental groups could retain their collocational knowledge. The final conclusion led us to the idea that the input-output and corpus-based instructions were the learners' strategies in solving the problem of understanding the collocations. The results may also have some pedagogical implications for ESL/EFL practitioners. The input-based and output-based instructions can help second language instructors in using innovative techniques to improve their learners' knowledge of collocations.