The Effects of Corpus-Based Teaching versus Virtual Classroom Design on Learning Collocations and Implementing them in the IELTS Speaking Test

This study was undertaken to find out whether there are any differences between the effects of teaching collocations through corpora, Whatsapp, and conventional classroom on the IELTS speaking module. To this end, 45 intermediate Iranian EFL students, who were selected as intact groups of both genders, participating in the IELTS preparation classes were assigned to three groups. Initially, all groups were administered an IELTS speaking pre-test. The two experimental groups were assigned as Whatsapp and corpus groups, receiving a two-month instruction through Whatsapp and AntConc- a corpus analysis toolkit- and the control group was taught through conventional classroom by their course books. The three aforementioned groups were instructed the same pedagogical materials but through different teaching channels. Finally, an IELTS speaking post-test was administered. The results of one-way ANOVA and Tukey test revealed that AntConc group outperformed the other groups, showing more noticeable improvement in their speaking performance. Whatsapp group also did noticeably better than the conventional class. The findings suggest that English teachers can use corpus-based teaching methods and mobile assisted language learning (MALL) approaches to enrich their teaching and motivate their students by drawing their attention to the materials through new teaching methodologies.