Teaching Collocations: Problems and Strategies

This book aims at identifying the types of errors committed by college students in dealing with English collocations as well as the learning strategies they resorted to in this task. The study also aimed at exploring the effect of an instructional programme which was designed for the purpose of teaching English collocations. Three types of collocation were included in this research, namely, idioms, lexical collocations, and grammatical ones.The results showed that the achievement of the students in the experimental group had improved significantly compared to the control group. The study also showed that the lexical type was the most challenging one, followed by idioms and that the least problematic one was grammatical collocations. Simultaneously, the strategies that the students resorted to were studied and analyzed and it seemed that retrieval was the strategy most used by the subjects followed by guessing, translation, and synonymy.Based on these findings, it is recommended that collocations should be taught as an independent subject in its own right due to their importance as well as the difficulty of this area in vocabulary learning.

Autorentext

Sana' Ababneh: Born 1970 in Bushra, Jordan, she obtained her B.A. in English in 1992, her M.A. in TEFL in 1997 and her Ph.D. in TEFL in 2008 all from Yarmouk University, Jordan. She is an assistant professor of English at Al-Balqa' Applied University, Jordan. Her research interests include TEFL and Arabic-English comparative studies.