The Role of Concordancing and Output in Developing the Collocational Competence

The present study explored the role of concordancing in learning lexical and grammatical collocations under two conditions, with and without output. It also set out to rank lexical and grammatical collocations in terms of the degree of the challenge they might impose on L2 learners. A total of 45 Iranian intermediate learners of English were randomly divided into an output, a non-output, and a control group. Learners received a six-session treatment in three different conditions; the output group was required to perform a story-writing task by searching for the collocations in concordancing. The non-output group only searched for collocations in concordancing without performing the tasks. The control group performed the tasks without having access to concordancing. The results of the pretest, as well as immediate and delayed posttests, analyzed by separate one-way ANOVAs indicated that the experimental groups outperformed the control group in learning collocations under the influence of concordancing. However, the achievement of the output group was superior to and more lasting than the non-output group. Findings also demonstrated that lexical collocations posed more challenge on all learners.