The Effect of Providing Collocational Awareness through Corpus on Iranian EFL Learners' Motivation to Write

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 Department of Foreign Languages Teaching, Ker. C., Islamic Azad University, Kermanshah, Iran.

2 Department of Foreign Languages Teaching, Ha. C. , Islamic Azad University, Hamadan, Iran.

3 Akram Korani, Department of Linguistics and English Teaching, Ker. C., Islamic Azad University, Kermanshah, Iran.

Abstract

Along with rapid technological development, it seems necessary for teachers to update their teaching methods to adapt to the modern technological changes affecting classrooms. The present study aimed to investigate the effect of collocational awareness on the motivation of Iranian EFL learners to write, as informed by a corpus. To this end, 45 female learners were randomly selected and divided into one control and two experimental groups. The control group was taught writing through the traditional method, while the first experimental group received treatment focused on collocational awareness, and the second experimental group received treatment incorporating corpus-based collocation awareness. A quasi-experimental pretest-posttest design was used. All participants in the three groups completed the Writing Motivation Questionnaire (Payne, 2012) before and after instruction. Independent-samples t-tests and ANOVA were used for statistical analysis. The results indicated that collocational awareness effectively motivated students to write. Moreover, it was found that the group receiving collocational awareness through the corpus (COCA) had a higher mean than the group receiving collocational awareness, meaning that using COCA could enhance the motivation of EFL learners to write more effectively. The results might be useful for teachers, material developers, and syllabus designers.

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