A Comparison Of The Effects Of Enhanced Input Flood And Form-focused Exercises In English Collocation Acquisition

For second language learners, collocational knowledge is indispensable for a large and rich repertoire. Literature has shown that English collocations were not given due attention in Chinese college English courses. Form-focused exercises on collocations, for their visible and fast return, have lied readily in most teachers'comfort zone. Studies on vocabulary acquisition have shown that the widely adopted way to facilitate vocabulary acquisition is to raise learners'noticing (Schmidt,1994), including explicit strategies (e.g. form-focused exercises) and implicit strategies (e.g. typographical salience, increased frequency of the targets). Studies investigating the effects of implicit noticing-raising strategies on vocabulary acquisition are piling up, but similar studies on collocation acquisition have been found inadequate and the effects of implicit strategies in collocation studies were largely overshadowed by the tangible benefits brought by form-focused exercises. This study sets out to prove the effectiveness and feasibility of the implicit strategy in collocation acquisition by contrasting "enhanced input flood" (high frequency of typographically salient targets within a short discourse) with form-focused exercises.Four groups of freshmen (n=l 12) in a Chinese university were exposed to 10 collocation targets. The first two groups learned the collocations through reading stories in which the targets were highlighted and appeared for 3 times or 6 times ("enhanced input flood"), hence E1F1 group and EIF2 group. The second two groups read one story and then did exercises on the collocations ("form-focused exercise"). They also met the targets 3 times or 6 times altogether, hence FFE1 group and FFE2 group. The learning outcome and retention were measured by three immediate and delayed posttests:recall of the collocations, recall of the verbs and recognition of the verbs. The findings of the this study are:I) "Form-focused exercises" are more beneficial than "enhanced input flood' in promoting collocation learning but the gains are prone to attrition; 2) "Enhanced input flood" was considered as an effective approach because encounters needed for reasonable gains through enhanced input were greatly reduced and the retention rate was much higher than that of "form-focused exercises"; 3) Some intrinsic features of the targets might be strong mediating factors in collocation learning.The study has some pedagogical implications. Apart from form-focused collocation exercises that should still play an important role in Chinese college English courses, teachers are advised to manipulate the input, either by creating typographic salience of the targets or by using artificial materials where the targets appear more frequently. Any pedagogical interventions should take into consideration the intrinsic features of different types of collocations.