Amalgamation of Technology Use and Collocation-focused Tasks in the Expansion of Reading Comprehension Capability of Turkish EFL Learners after Covid-19 Period Biographical Information

Abstract

Drastic changes in education like depending on remote and online education during and after Corona Virus Disease 2019 (Covid-19) have been undergone globally. As a result, instructors and learners were convinced to pursue their objectives despite the complications of pandemic disease. To this end, this study focuses on the effect of extra-curricular collocation-basedassignments on reading comprehension skill and the utilization of technology in the context of education. Thus, in this quasi-experimental study two homogeneous groups including sixty intermediate students from a state university in Turkey were selected. Reading comprehension instruction was given to both groups who participated in online education run by a Moodle Application.While the experimental group received additional collocation-focused education and assignments, the control group had traditional reading comprehension education without noticing the importance and conducive effect of collocations. To compare the means of the two groups pre and post-tests, and two independent T-tests were used. Ameaningful difference in the means of the groups on the post-test of reading comprehension performance was obvious in the results section. Last but not the least, assignment, as an academic extra-curricular activity, had a considerable impact on Turkish intermediate EFL learners’ foreign language reading comprehension ability after the pandemic lockdown period.