چکیده:
The present study aims at investigating the effect of different levels of lexical collocational density on EFL learners’ reading comprehension. Eighty sophomore students with different levels of proficiency studying at Zand Institute of Higher Education in Shiraz, Iran were chosen from among eighty five learners based on their score distribution on a reduced TOEFL test constructed by Educational Testing Service (ETS,1998). Forty participants were randomly assigned to the control group, while the other forty made the experimental group. Another instrument used in this study was a lexical collocation test containing two texts (as pre- and post-tests): A high and a low lexical collocational density tests designed by the researchers. A few paired/independent sample t-tests, and a two-way repeated measure were used to answer the five research questions. Results indicated that texts with high lexical collocational density influenced learners’ comprehension positively. Although the instruction of lexical collocation did not have any effects on answering the vocabulary items significantly, teaching lexical collocations affected learners’ reading skills positively. Finally, different proficiency levels of the participants did not affect their performance on lexical collocation test with different lexical collocational density significantly.
خلاصه ماشینی:
Studies done on collocation Author(s) Participants Instruments Collocation Findings Lin (2001) 89 senior high school students in Taiwan a 15-item blank- filling test a 15-item multiple- choice test, a 40- item self- developed English proficiency test, a questionnaire lexical collocations (V + N) A strong correlation between collocation knowledge overall English proficiency Zughoul Hussein (2001) 70 university students in Jordan a 20-item multiple-choice a translation task lexical collocations (V + N) EFL learners have insufficient knowledge of English collocations Tseng (2002) 94 senior high school students in Taiwan two 50-item blank-filling tests two compositions a questionnaire lexical collocations (V + N) The positive effects of collocation instruction on collocation knowledge MartyDsk a (2004) 53 high school students in Poland word matching, collocation completing, correct option selecting, error identifying and correcting lexical collocations The importance of learning chunks Tang (2004) 96 first-year university students in Taiwan a revised speaking and writing tests (General English Proficiency Test) lexical collocations grammatical collocations No direct relationship between collocation competence overall English proficiency Mahmoud (2005) 42 university students in Sultanate of Oman 42 essays lexical collocations grammatical collocations The importance of collocation instruction Wang (2005) 75 university students in Taiwan (senior English majors) a modified, in- depth vocabulary knowledge measure 3 oral elicitation tasks, a questionnaire lexical collocations No direct relationship between collocation competence depth of vocabulary knowledge Keshavarz Salimi (2007) 100 university students in Iran a 36-item multiple-choice cloze test a 36- item open-ended lexical grammatical collocations EFL learners have insufficient knowledge of English collocations Author(s) Participants Instruments Collocation Findings cloze test, a TOEFL test A strong correlation between collocation knowledge overall English proficiency Zhang (1993) 60 college freshmen native and non-native speakers of English fill-in-the-blank collocation test and a writing task Lexical collocations native English writers outperformed non- native writers on the collocation test, native writers performed better than non-native writers in the writing task Rahimi (2005) 60 Iranian EFL students A multiple-choice test of vocabulary Lexical collocations systematic teaching of lexical collocations has positive effects on the Iranian EFL learners' vocabulary learning Chen (2008) 355 first-year non-English major university students 50-item multiple- choice collocation test lexical grammatical collocations A positive correlation between collocation knowledge overall English proficiency participants did not demonstrate sufficient collocation knowledge Table 1 shows that different methodologies and different participants (high school students’ and university students) were used examining collocational competence and their types (cf.