Innovation in Language Learning

The present study intended to explore the role of concordancing in learners' productive knowledge of lexical and grammatical collocations as well as the differential influence of output when learners take advantage of concordancing to learn L2 collocations. Furthermore, it elicited learners' attitudes toward the role of concordancing and output in learning collocations. To this purpose, a total of 45 volunteer Iranian intermediate learners of English were randomly divided into an output group, a nonoutput group, and a control group. Duringa 6-session treatment, the output group received a topic along with a list of related nodes to search concordancing, find the appropriate collocate, and perform a story-writing task embedding the targeted collocations. The nonoutput group, however, was only required to search those collocations in concordancing, read the examples, and pay attention to the collocations without any production. The control group only performed the story-writing tasks without having access to concordancing. The results obtained indicated that the experimental groups outperformed the control group in producing collocations both in the immediate and delayed posttests. However, findings showed that there was no significant difference between the performance of the experimental groups in the immediate posttest while there was a significant difference between them in the delayed posttest. The results of the questionnaire revealed that all learners had positive attitudes towardthe effect of both concordancing and output on learning L2 collocations.

Key terms: Collocations, concordancing, output