Effects of WhatsApp, Adobe Connect, and Face-to-face Classes on Learning Collocations by Iranian EFL Learners

Technology has crept into every aspect of human life, and second language education is not an exception, giving rise to computer-enhanced language learning and mobile-assisted language learning. This study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of WhatsApp, Adobe Connect, and face-to-face classes on learning collocations by Iranian EFL learners in Qom, and to make comparisons among these three platforms. Thus, a quasi-experimental design was set up in which a number of available intermediate-level students were assigned to a WhatsApp group, an Adobe Connect group, and a Control group. The three groups were given a collocation pretest at the outset of the study and they were exposed to collocations, though through different media. In the treatment, which lasted for 10 sessions, for the learners in the WAG and ACG, the collocations were presented via a picture, an example sentence, and a follow-up quiz, which the CG learners received the same collocations in a similar fashion except that they were not provided with videos/pictures. At the end of the experiment, the learners were given a posttest of collocations, and the following results were obtained after running paired-samples t tests and a one-way ANCOVA: (a) the three groups of WAG, ACG, and CG were fruitful and the learners in all these environments improved significantly from pretest to posttest of collocations, and (b) ACG learners significantly outperformed WAG learners, who in turn could perform significantly better than the CG learners. The obtained results bear implications for education in general and second language instruction in particular.