Assessing Collocational Competence by Probating Emotioncy: Testing the Mediating Role of Gender in Educational Dimensions

The purpose of this paper was to examine at shedding more light into the effectiveness of emotioncy on gender in assessing Persian EFL learners’ collocational competence. This study used quantitative methods and the learners were from both intermediate and advanced proficiency groups. The results indicated that male participants who received emotioncy levels performed more efficiently on C-test and open ended test in comparison with females who recorded better performance on cloze test. The study suggested important results for EFL instructors that teacher’s experiences showed Iranian EFL learners generally have inadequate knowledge of English collocations in particular of restricted collocations. Moreover, some participants in this study believed that collocations could not be regarded as something that EFL learners could acquire without any instruction; therefore, it was essential to incorporate collocation instruction into EFL reading classes. The findings could help teachers and curriculum designers to classify errors in a continuum ranging from the least to the most problematic ones.