The comparative effects of meaning-focused and form-focused instruction on L2 collocation learning

Abstract

This study investigates differential effects of Meaning-Focused (MFI) and Form Focused Instruction (FFI) on learning of L2 collocations. Ninety-three university students with elementary level of proficiency in three intact classes participated in the study and they were randomly assigned to one of the experimental conditions, namely MFI, FFI and Control. MFI and FFI groups took part in three 40-minute instructional sessions in line with the assigned treatment. In these sessions, MFI group read passages which contained and recycled the target collocations and answered comprehension questions without help of a dictionary. FFI group, on the other hand, read the same passages and answered the same questions but dictionary use was allowed and target collocations were bold-faced in their passages to draw attention to form. Control group took only pretests and posttests. Adopting a corpus based approach in the selection of target collocations, 20 verb-noun collocations were selected according to Node Frequency, Mutual Information and Log Dice scores. Pretests and posttests measured collocation gains at form recognition, meaning recall and form recall levels of mastery. Overall results showed that experimental groups improved significantly whereas there were no significant differences in Control group’s scores from pretest to posttests. Moreover, FFI group had a significant advantage over MFI group in the mastery levels of form recognition and form recall highlighting importance of attention to form to master formal aspects of collocations.