The effect of Collocation Instruction on Senior High School Students' Vocabulary Acquisition and Reading Comprehension

Abstract

This study aimed to investigate the effect of collation instruction on senior high school EFL students’ vocabulary acquisition and reading comprehension The results for vocabulary and reading comprehension were analyzed to gauge the effect of collocation instruction The participants of this study were 72 senior high school students in Southern Taiwan The experimental procedure was conducted in the following manner First the participants filled in a questionnaire which was used to investigate their learning background Next the participants completed vocabulary pre-tests after which the researcher taught vocabulary using two types of vocabulary instructions namely single-item vocabulary instruction and collocation instruction Then the participants were given vocabulary post-tests and reading comprehension tests Finally the participants filled in a questionnaire which investigated students’ perspectives on collocation instruction The primary results of this study are presented as follows For vocabulary acquisition there appeared to be no difference in acquisition performance between single-item vocabulary instruction and collocation instruction However for reading comprehension students performed better when they received collocation instruction Despite not performing better with collocation instruction in term of vocabulary acquisition the survey results generally showed that the students felt that collocation instruction benefited their vocabulary learning Furthermore they did not regard collocation instruction as burdensome for learning new vocabulary

Date of Award	2016 Aug 2
Original language	English
Supervisor	Wen-Li Tsou (Supervisor)