Teaching English Collocation to Iranian EFL Learners through Games

Abstract

Collocations are one of the most current issues and crucial constituent in second or foreign
language acquisition. So, second language learners, need to put effort to learn collocation in
order to make their speech and writing sound natural native-like. To achieve this aim, 60 preintermediate
EFL learners studying in a language institute in the city of Shahrekord participated
in this study. They were randomly assigned to group A as the experimental group and group B as
the control group. A pretest was first administered to see their level of collocational knowledge.
In treatment sessions, collocation was taught through games such as Collocation Pelmanism,
Flyswatters Board Rush game, Find your Partner, Guess the missing word, Collocation Domino
game, and Collocation order to the experimental group. Control group was taught based on
traditional method such as translation, definition, synonyms, and check the meaning on the
dictionary. Finally, a posttest was administered to determine the impact of specific treatments
the participants received. It was different from the pretest.The result of data analyze using
paried-samples and independent-samples t-test revealed that experimental group outperformed
control group and teaching collocation through games had positive effect on vocabulary
learning.