The Effects of Feedback Types on Learners’ Recognition of Lexical Collocations Lexical Collocations

This study investigated the effects of three types of feedback on Iranian EFL learners’ recognition of lexical collocations. 78 pre-intermediate students from among 90 were selected to participate in this study. A KET (Key English Test) was used in order to homogenize them. A teacher-made pre-test including all 150 target lexical collocations was used to make sure that the students did not know the target lexical collocations beforehand. Then the participants were divided into three experimental groups. All groups received the same instruction during 10 sessions of treatment. However, they received different types of feedback. Each session, the teacher gave a handout including 15 English sentences to each student. There was one lexical collocation in each sentence which was written in parentheses. Students were asked to write 15 collocations within twenty minutes and then submit the paper to the teacher. Then the teacher underlined the errors and gave them back to the students. Students in group A received direct feedback from the teacher. Students in group B received indirect feedback and the last group received peer feedback on their collocational errors. At the end of the treatment, 30 multiple-choice items were used to test students’ recognition of lexical collocations. The result of One-Way ANOVA procedure revealed that the group that received indirect feedback had the best performance, followed closely by the group that received peer feedback. Students in direct feedback group had the lowest performance. The findings suggest that different types of feedback have different effects on EFL learners’ recognition of lexical collocations.

Collocation, Peer feedback, Direct or Explicit Feedback, Indirect Feedback