A Study of Collocation Learning for Junior High School Students in EFL Classrooms

• Main Authors: HSU, CHIA-WEI, 許珈瑋
• Other Authors: TSAY, LI-JIUAN
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2019
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/h684vw

碩士 === 銘傳大學 === 應用英語學系碩士班 === 107 === Researchers have found that English collocations are of value and suggested that collocation learning is beneficial in transferring receptive vocabulary into productive vocabulary. Collocations have traditionally been seen as effective tools to learn whereby the foreign language learners can achieve higher levels of fluency and accuracy (Wray, 2000). However, previous studies have indicated that English learners have little awareness and insufficient knowledge on collocation. Hence, this study aims to investigate whether junior high school students’ knowledge of collocations can help improve their reading comprehension. Sixty-one ninth graders in the southern Taoyuan area participated in this study. In the experiment, the common verb-collocations derived from existing literature findings were taught in the class for one semester. Pre- and post-tests were conducted to measure students’ progress in their reading comprehension based on the introduction of collocation learning. The results show that teaching English collocations helped students enhance their understanding of vocabulary in different reading contexts which lead to better comprehension when reading.