Language Teacher Educators’ Knowledge and Practice of Teaching Collocations

The purpose of this study was to investigate language teacher educators’ knowledge and perceptions of significance of teaching collocations, strategies, methods, and technology use for teaching collocations and how to educate pre-service teachers for teaching collocations. An interview with eight questions was conducted with five teacher educators at Iran University of Science and Technology. Teacher educators held the view that collocation is important as language appears in chunks and that using collocation shows the depth of learners’ knowledge. For teaching collocations to adults, they suggested teaching through texts, dictionaries, and using gap-filling and consciousness raising tasks, while for teaching collocations to young learners they used movies, games, pictures, and technological tools. To improve collocation knowledge, they recommended the assignments of playing with collocations, making sentences with collocations, and using online tests. They also emphasized improving pre-service teachers’ perceptions and knowledge of collocation for teaching to EFL learners.