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 ofcollocations. Following Idiom Principle, the Moderate Version of Contrastive Analysis and Lexical Approach as wellas the Hamshahri Newspaper corpus, this study, revealed that there are some thousand simple verbs in English whilePersian has about 300 single-word verbs and the rest of Persian verb lexicon is filled with verb collocations. Inaddition, it was found that English uses different strategies to make new verbs while Persian has very limitedresources. Another outcome of the study indicated that Persian requires subject and object arguments explicitlyexpressed in the sentence while English can easily conceal them in their syntactic or semantic layers. The researchconcludes that collocation in English is a strategy, while in Persian it is a necessity. Another instrument in thisresearch was a survey on the effect of awareness-raising on the quality of the learner’s feedback. It included 160participants placed in two control and experimental groups, and the latter group received intervention on verbcollocation. The result of the study shows that when learners become familiar with the grammaticalized features ofverbs, they can do better in the respective test.

The Significance of Teaching Verb Collocations to Iranian EFL Learners Keywords:

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