Effects of Receptive and Productive Tasks on Iranian EFL Students' Learning of Verb-noun Collocations

Abstract

The current study is an attempt to investigate the effects of receptive (reading three glossed sentences) and productive (completing a cloze task) tasks on learning English verb-noun collocations in an Iranian English as a foreign language (EFL) learning context. To this end, ninety four EFL university learners were divided into two experimental (reading and cloze) groups and one control group. To determine the effects of the tasks, the participants in all three groups were given receptive and productive collocation pretests aiming at examining their existing knowledge of collocation and posttests to measure the learners' gained knowledge of collocation after being exposed to the treatments. The results of a Paired sample t-test revealed that both the reading and cloze groups had manifested significant enhancement in their knowledge of collocation after the treatments.