The effect of teaching collocations on English language proficiency

This study investigated the effect of teaching collocations on English language proficiency. Sixty students participated in a pretest-posttest quasi-experimental design study. For four months, the control group was taught the new words in isolation with traditional techniques such as translation and definition. In the experimental group, vocabulary was taught by providing students with collocations of a particular word through using concordancers and corpus-based activities. After the experiment both groups participated in a language proficiency test. The statistical analyses showed that the experimental group outperformed the control group in the posttest, implying that teaching collocations can improve students language proficiency.