The Significance of Teaching Verb Collocations to Iranian EFL Learners

There are similarities and differences in the verb systems in English and Persian especially in terms of collocations. Following Idiom Principle, the Moderate Version of Contrastive Analysis and Lexical Approach as well as the Hamshahri Newspaper corpus, this study, revealed that there are some thousand simple verbs in English while Persian has about ۳۰۰ single-word verbs and the rest of Persian verb lexicon is filled with verb collocations. In addition, it was found that English uses different strategies to make new verbs while Persian has very limited resources. Another outcome of the study indicated that Persian requires subject and object arguments explicitly expressed in the sentence while English can easily conceal them in their syntactic or semantic layers. The research concludes that collocation in English is a strategy, while in Persian it is a necessity. Another instrument in this research was a survey on the effect of awareness-raising on the quality of the learner’s feedback. It included ۱۶۰ participants placed in two control and experimental groups, and the latter group received intervention on verb collocation. The result of the study shows that when learners become familiar with the grammaticalized features of verbs, they can do better in the respective test.

Keywords:

delexical verbs , lexical approach , syntax , verb collocation , verb types