The Impact of Telegram on Learning of Collocational Knowledge among Iranian EFL High School Students

Abstract

ABSTRACT Rapidly developing mobile applications and ubiquitous access to the Internet provide the learners with extended opportunities to be independent from any time and location. In this regard, this study aimed to investigate the impact of Telegram on collocation learning of Iranian EFL learners. To this end, 40 high school participants whose language proficiency homogeneity was examined through a language proficiency test were selected and randomly divided into two equal-in- number groups of 20 students in the experimental and control group. To minimize the effect of participants’ background knowledge in terms of collocations, a pretest was administered to the participants. At the end of treatment sessions, parallel to the pretest a teacher-made collocation knowledge test was administered for both the control and experimental groups in order to measure the learners’ progress as a result of instruction. The experimental group installed Telegram application on their mobiles or tablets for collocation learning and retention, whereas the control groups were not allowed to use any tool. To ascertain that the participants were statistically different in terms of collocation learning, an independent samples t-test was run between the experimental and control groups’ post-test scores. In order to determine the effectiveness of the program, a paired samples t-test was also conducted to compare the mean scores of pre-test and post-test of both groups. Analyzing the results showed that there was a significant difference between the performance of experimental and control groups, of course, in favor of experimental group confirming the effect of Telegram on improving collocational knowledge among Iranian high school students. This study implies that utilizing telegram as a newly emerging mobile application has various pedagogical benefits and fosters EFL instruction effectively.