The Effects of Receptive and Productive Learning Tasks on EFL Learners’ Knowledge of Collocation and Meaning

Abstract

Collocations are one of the important components of native speaker competence. For this reason, there have been many studies investigating explicit teaching methods of them. However, most of them did not focus on receptive and productive tasks independently. This study aims to explore the effectiveness of receptive and productive vocabulary tasks on learning collocation and meaning in an EFL setting. Turkish EFL learners participated in the study and they were randomly assigned to receptive task, productive task and control groups. The receptive task group read three glossed sentences for each of the 20 target collocations and the productive task group completed a cloze task. The results showed that both tasks were effective to lead to learning gains in collocation and meaning. Although the results were not significant, the participants in the receptive task group were able to reach higher scores on receptive knowledge of collocation and meaning than on the productive ones.