Using productive tasks to improve efl students’ lexical collocational knowledge  

Oleh:

Nugroho, Ardi

Jenis: Article from Proceeding
Dalam koleksi: KOLITA 16: Konferensi Linguistik Tahunan Atma Jaya Keenam Belas Tingkat Internasional, page 83-87.
Topik: Teaching; lexical collocation; productive task
Fulltext: 83-87 Ardi Nugroho.pdf (603.08KB)

Isi artikel

EFL learners in Indonesia often have difficulty in producing accurate English lexical collocations. There are various factors that may contribute to this problem, such as the influence of their L1 or Indonesian language which leads them to make some rather unnatural collocations as they string words together based on how they would normally do it in their mother tongue. Another possible reason for their inability to produce proper collocations is their overall low collocational knowledge. In other words, the learners lack knowledge of the correct combination of words that native speakers of English normally use. This is further reinforced by the fact that the teaching of English in Indonesia is generally more concerned with grammar and not so much on collocations. Even at the university level, it has been found that students frequently come up with inaccurate word combinations, be it in their speech or in their writing. Hence, it is imperative that teachers of English try to find the best way to teach collocations to their students. From this the writer has become interested in exploring various ways to teach English lexical collocations. Although there are numerous means of doing this, the current study only focuses on one particular way, i.e. using productive tasks. More specifically, this research is aimed at investigating the effect of using productive tasks to improve Indonesian students’ English lexical collocational knowledge. The respondents are students from the English Department at Bunda Mulia University. The students are divided into two groups, namely the control and experimental group. The control group is taught collocations using traditional methods, whereas the experimental group is given a productive task as the treatment. The source of data is the result of the two groups’ collocation pretest and posttest. The data is analyzed using the paired sample T-test to see whether there is a significant difference between the result of the pre and posttest for both groups, especially for the experimental group which has been given the treatment. The lexical collocations for the current study are limited to the verb + noun and adjective + noun word combinations. The findings show that even though the average of the posttest is higher than the pretest for both groups, the differences are not very significant. It is only significant for the productive collocation test, and even this only applies for the control group. Thus, it can be concluded that using productive tasks does not significantly improve students’ overall collocational competence.

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