Task orientation and vocabulary knowledge types: how do they relate to collocational knowledge?

Abstract

This study aims to investigate the effects of task orientation (input vs. output orientation) on the acquisition of productive collocational knowledge and explore the differences among the gains in different measures of passive and active recall of collocations. It also aims to identify learner opinions regarding the input-oriented and output-oriented teaching tasks, output-oriented assessment tasks and the learning of collocations. The experimental group (P-group, N = 22) studied collocations through output-oriented tasks (non-cued inference-making and translation, sentence-construction and non-cued gap-filling). The control group (R-group, N = 22) studied collocations through input-oriented tasks (cued inference-making and translation, sentence-half matching and cued gap-filling). An immediate post-test consisting of output-oriented assessment tasks measuring participants’ gains in productive collocational knowledge -as implied by task orientation- or passive and active recall of collocations -as implied by Laufer et al.’s (2004) typology- was administered to both groups. The quantitative data were analyzed via an independent samples t-test to investigate the effects of task orientation on productive collocational knowledge and via a one-way repeated measures ANOVA to explore the differences among the gains in passive and active recall of collocations within the R-group and the P-group. The t-test results demonstrated that the groups did not statistically significantly differ in their productive collocational knowledge. However, the ANOVA results revealed statistically significant differences among the gains in passive and active recall of collocations after the treatment within both the R-group and the P-group.