The Effect of Teaching Lexical Collocational Clashes on Iranian EFL learners Speaking Proficiency

Collocations are one of the areas generally considered problematic for EFL learners. Iranian learners of English like other EFL learners face various problems in producing oral collocations. This study focuses on the role of teaching lexical collocational clashes on Iranian EFL learners speaking proficiency .For this purpose, an attempt was first made to define collocations and to dwell on their significance in language learning. Then, the types of errors that the learners made when producing collocations were identified and analyzed as to their source and frequency of occurrence among Iranian EFL learners. The data for this study came from the oral productions of 60 adult Iranian EFL learners. They were chosen among 90students through the PET and a general vocabulary knowledge test. They were thus randomly divided into two groups, experimental and control, each consisting of 30 students. The new vocabulary was presented to the control group through classical techniques such as synonym, antonym, definition and mother tongue equivalence as it was in the previous classes before the study. The experimental group was presented the new vocabulary through their collocations which were thought to be the most frequent ones. The statistical analysis showed that the experimental group had a better performance comparing to the control group.. The findings of the present study will give teachers some hints and guidelines as to overcome EFL student's problems in lexical collocations, the material developers to write suitable materials for the students.

Keywords:

Collocations , clashes , EFL learners , proficiency , oral productions