THE EFFECT OF COLLOCATION AWARENESS-RAISING ON THE EAP LEARNERSʹʹ ACHIEVEMENT OF ACADEMIC COLLOCATIONS THROUGH WRITING TASKS

The effect of collocation awareness-raising plays an important role on achievement of academic collocations by English for academic purposes (EAP) learners. In order to provide a developmental inquiry into raising learners’ awareness to achieve academic collocations through writing tasks, this study examined a sample of 38 English language learners in two groups: one group with teaching academic collocations through underlining, as a measure of noticing, and the other group with explicit teaching of academic collocations within a six-week semester. The participantsʹ collocational competence was tested running a pretest of academic collocations prior to teaching and a posttest of academic collocations following six sessions of teaching the collocations in question. The results demonstrated that the learners who learnt academic collocations through Collocation Awareness Raising (CAR) showed a constant increase in success rate, the number of collocations learnt, and making use of collocations to make more fluent and correct English sentences instead of creating incorrect, long and inappropriate phrases and utterances. Pedagogical implications of these findings are discussed in terms of training effect.