The role of input enhancement and input flooding in producing lexical and grammatical collocations

The significant importance of collocations in second language learning has been proved inthe past few decades. There have been numerous studies that investigated the effects ofdifferent methods on teaching collocations. In this regard, this study compared the role ofinput flooding and input enhancement in producing lexical and grammatical collocations. Atotal of 60 volunteer Iranian intermediate learners of English were randomly divided into aninput flooding group, an input enhancement group, and a control group (20 in each). Eachsession the input flooding group received two short readings including 10 target lexical andgrammatical collocations which were repeated for five times. The input enhancement groupreceived two short readings including those 10 target lexical and grammatical collocations inbold. The control group received those short readings without repeated or bold collocations.At the end of each session, the three groups were supposed to write short summaries for thereadings that they received. As the immediate and delayed posttests, the three groupsreceived a topic along with a list of nodes. They were provided with Persian equivalents ofcollocations and the type of the collocate. They were supposed to perform a story–writingtask embedding the target collocations. The results of the study, which were collectedthrough a pre-test, an immediate post-test, and a delayed post-test, demonstrated that theexperimental groups outperformed the control group in producing lexical and grammaticalcollocations both on the immediate and delayed posttests. However, there was no significantdifference between the performance of the experimental groups on the immediate and delayedposttests.

Keywords:

Collocations , input enhancement , input flooding