Student and Teacher Attitude Toward Using Concordancing in Learning and Teaching Preposition Collocations: Issues and Options

The present study explored the effectiveness and efficacy of concordance-based instruction on learning and using proposition collocations (PCs) by Iranian EFL learners. Furthermore, we explored the instructional issues involved from both students and the teacher's perspectives. To this end, 60 homogeneous intermediate EFL learners participated in the study as the two thirty-subject groups of experimental and control. A researcher-made test on PCs was administered as the pretest to make sure that the learners’ knowledge of PCs was approximately equal. Two parallel versions of the pretest were administered, in turn, as the immediate and delayed posttests with the aim of evaluating the possible effect(s) of eight sixty-minute treatment sessions. The results of a repeated-measures ANOVA revealed a significant difference between the performance of the experimental group and control group from the immediate to the delayed posttests. Also, the effect for the interaction of time and group was significant. At the end of the study, a 20-item questionnaire was administered to elicit participants’ attitudes towards using concordancing to learn PCs. The results revealed that almost all respondents expressed positive attitudes towards learning PCs through concordancing, although some participants faced some practical or technical difficulties while using this technology. We also surveyed the teacher’s attitude towards concordance-based PC instruction via an interview, proposing further issues and options for the classroom teaching practice. Lastly, the implications of the study for language teaching and applied linguistics are discussed.