DEVELOPING COLLOCATIONAL COMPETENCE THROUGH WEB BASED CONCORDANCE ACTIVITIES

The last decade has witnessed a strong impact of corpora and corpus linguistics on the methodology of language pedagogy. Corpora based language learning claims to provide a discovery based authentic learning environment. However, the research in corpora based language instruction (data-driven learning) is still in progress and needs more effort to draw promising implications for EFL / ESL settings. This quasi-experimental research, which is a comparison between two experimental conditions, was conducted to investigate the effects of data-driven learning (DDL) on EFL learners’ achievement and retention of lexical competence comparing to dictionary use. Instruction was delivered to the participants of the study through a learning management system (Moodle). A collocation test was developed to gather data through ANCOVA and descriptive statistics. The results of the study revealed that pre and posttests did not show a significant difference between the two experimental groups. A later ‘retention’ test did show that the corpora!based learning group had a higher level of retention. Some suggestions for further research were discussed based on the findings.