The Effects of Vocabulary Learning on Collocation and Meaning

This study investigates the effects of receptive and productive vocabulary tasks on learning collocation and meaning. Japanese English as a foreign language students learned target words in three glossed sentences and in a cloze task. To determine the effects of the treatments, four tests were used to measure receptive and productive knowledge of collocation and meaning. The results showed that both tasks led to significant gains in knowledge with little difference between the size of the gains. When participants were grouped according to level, the productive task was more effective for higher level learners, and the receptive task was more effective for lower level learners. Mean scores on the productive tests were slightly higher for both tasks on the test of meaning than on the test of collocation. However, the findings indicate knowledge of collocation may be acquired at a rate similar to that of meaning, and that tasks which focus on collocation, as well as meaning, may be effective.