Effects of Input Enhancement and Input Flooding on Learning English Collocations by Iranian Undergraduate EFL Students Through Corpus-based Instruction

This study examined the impact of input flooding and visual input enhancement on the learning of English collocations. The research used instructional materials based on a corpus and followed a nonequivalent quasi-experimental design. A pretest, posttest, and delayed posttest procedure was used to gather the necessary data. Seventy-five EFL students at an upper-intermediate level functioned as the participants of the study. They were divided into three groups: two experimental groups (E1 and E2) and one control group. Each group consisted of 25 students. The teaching materials included fifty collocations. The experimental groups were given input-based tasks. As part of their task, they had to search for collocations in the concordance lines. Only the textbook was used by the participants in the control group for learning collocations. Mixed-ANOVA, One-way ANOVA, and various post hoc Tukey tests were employed to analyze the gathered data. The study revealed that the simultaneous implementation of input enhancement and input flooding had a positive impact on the acquisition of English collocations. In addition, the results suggested that the understanding of collocations remained intact among all the experimental groups. This led the researcher to conclude that using input and corpus-based tasks were effective strategies for students to understand collocations. These findings could have important implications for ESP/EFL instructors. By using input-focused instructions, second-language educators can use creative techniques to improve their students understanding of collocations.