TEACHING COLLOCATION AT INTERMEDIATE LEVEL A CORPUS ASSISTED APPROACH

One of the aspects of knowing a word is the knowledge of its usage. Since knowledge of collocations is essential for appropriate and fluent use of language, learning collocations has a central place in the study of vocabulary. There are different opinions about the best ways of learning collocations. This study investigates the effectiveness of corpus - assisted activities for learning. Corpus tools have enabled linguistic researchers and teachers to investigate actual usages and the characteristics of certain genres in order to improve syllabus design and infer more effective classroom exercises. Using teacher - prepared materials obtained from Intermediate, Punjab Text Books in the form of corpus (all four English books), and the goal of the present study is to compare corpus-assisted teaching and traditional methods of teaching collocations. The two classes studying English at Intermediate level comprise the experimental and control group, respectively. Pre- and Post - tests have been used as data collection tools. During the teaching phase, the learners are exposed to teacher - prepared corpus - based materials from Intermediate Text Books (All Four English Books) such as word list, synonyms, keywords in context (KWICs) and collocations. Moreover, they are asked to do similar searches on their own as homework. The learners are exposed to lexical words only (such as nouns, verbs, adjectives), and the functional items are ignored. The results of the study indicate that the learners in the experimental group outperform their counterparts in the control group. The better performance of the former group can be attributed to the fact that the learners take a more active role in the learning process where self – discovery, inductive and bottom - up processes are emphasized.