An investigation into the effect of graphic organizers and marginal glossing on recalling of collocations among iranian efl learners with different proficiency levels

Abstract

There has been an upsurge of research in vocabulary teaching and learning since 1980s, part of the hidden motivation being due to technology of concordance giving birth to some new areas of inquiry such as corpus linguistics. As one category of vocabulary is collocations (Nation, 1990) its learning will be required to sound fluent in the language of our focus i.e., English. The present study investigates the effect of graphic organizers (GO) and marginal glossing (MG) on recalling of collocations among Iranian EFL learners with different proficiency levels. To accomplish the task, Quick Placement Test was administered to 270 EFL learners in order to determine their proficiency levels (elementary, intermediate and advanced levels). Then learners of each level were randomly assigned to one control and two experimental groups. Experimental and control groups received the collocation instruction differently. After seven session treatments, results of paired-sample revealed that all of the groups made gains from pre-test to post-test but it was significant for groups that received graphic organizers strategy. Furthermore, results of one-way ANOVA indicated that advanced group outperformed intermediate group, and intermediate group was better than elementary group.