Iranian Pre-university Student s Retention of Collocations: Implicit Exposure or Explicit Instruction

The effectiveness of different teaching methods of collocational expressions in ESL/EFL contexts of education has been a point of debate for more than two decades. Whereas some scholars (Boers et al., 2006; Ellis & Bogart, 2007 ; Schmitt & Zimmerman, 2002;Taylor et al., 2009) believe in explicit instruction of collocations, several others such as (Celce-Murcia 2001; Ellis 1997; Gass,1999;Krashen,1994; Nagay & Herman 1987) acknowledge that there is no need for explicit instruction of collocational expressions since sufficient exposure to the target language input and sequences can result in automatic learning of those items. To shed more light on the issue, the present study aimed at finding about which king of instruction, explicit or implicit, is more rewarding for Iranian Pre-university students in the formal context of education in Iran. To this end, 90 pre-university students who were eager to participate in the National University Entrance Exam were randomly distributed into three groups, explicit instruction, implicit exposure, and control group each containing 15 female and 15 male students . All the groups participated in preparatory classes which lasted for 8 weeks, 16 sessions for each class, with the explicit groups being taught by consciousness-raising techniques, implicit group by input flood of exemplars and collocational expressions present in their books , and the control group by some traditional teaching techniques common among teachers in the EFL context of Iran. The participants were given three sets of multiple choice questions as pretest, posttest, and delayed posttest. The results of data analysis indicated that both implicit and explicit method of teaching collocations were effective with regard to their efficiency in development of collocational knowledge in both posttest and delayed posttest. However, the explicit group outperformed the implicit group in both posttest and delayed posttest regarding the enhancement of collocational knowledge of Iranian pre-university students. The findings of the study can be illuminating for all those who are teaching English in both formal and informal context of education in Iran.

کلیدواژه ها:

collocations ، implicit exposure ، explicit instruction ، pre-university students ، EFL context of education