Factores que Influencian en el Comportamiento

The findings from this study are also applicable to the larger field of teacher education. Teacher education programs should make prospective teachers aware of collocations and the importance collocations have on a learner’s productive abilities. Teachers should also be conscious of aspects of language which are suitable for explicit instruction. Additionally, a well-designed language program should expose students to the target language repeatedly.

While new teachers are likely mindful of the importance of vocabulary, they need to be made aware of the depth of knowledge required to gain command over a given word. Receptive ability of a lexical item is only one aspect of the knowledge required before a word is fully acquired by a language learner. Learners need to be aware of a lexical item’s form, meaning and use. Form includes aspects such as a word’s pronunciation, spelling, and how it can be conjugated. Meaning can be represented by an L1 translation, but it also involves the meaning a word carries in the L2 given the context in which it is used. ‘Use’ includes aspects of knowledge such as the formality a word has, its register, and also the words with which it is commonly used (a word’s collocates). Collocation knowledge is another way to refer to this last aspect of ‘use’. Instructors can improve a learner’s knowledge of

collocations in a variety of ways such as explicitly teaching collocations as chunks of

language as I did in this study. Another approach is to simply raise awareness, so students will notice collocations within the input they receive. Henriksen and Stenius Stoehr (2009) state that language instructors have not paid enough attention to collocations due to several reasons such as a lack of comprehension problems despite collocation errors, a lack of collocation awareness in both the teacher and student, and a lack of understanding of the importance of improving the depth of vocabulary knowledge for a given word. Collocation knowledge influences a learner’s productive ability more so than their receptive ability. A language learner might be able to comprehend an utterance without having knowledge of the specific collocations which were used. The learner might not be aware that they are

incapable of using a lexical item because they do not know the words that are commonly used with the lexical item. By expanding a student’s knowledge of words that they are already familiar with, as opposed to continually teaching unknown individual lexical items, an instructor can attend to a language learner’s productive ability in a more effective manner.

Language instructors would become more efficient if they differentiated aspects of vocabulary which are more suitable for explicit instruction. As mentioned previously, two such areas were identified and targeted over the course of this investigation, and

importance of identifying suitable collocations for instruction. I use one criterion for identifying these categories of language: a problematic nature for acquisition through exposure alone. For example, the adjective + noun collocations from the fourth reflective cycle are structures which would be difficult to acquire through exposure alone because the noun collocate has a meaning which is dependent upon the adjective with which it is used (see the previous section for an example). However, if the entire collocation is treated as a chunk of language, the different meanings associated with the one lexical item can be acquired. To illustrate with the previous example, if a student learns that the noun ‘way’ has a meaning similar to ‘method’ they would likely understand and be able to produce the collocations ‘easy way’ and ‘best way’. However, if they encountered the collocation ‘long way’ they might be able to understand its meaning given the context, but they would be less likely to be able to use this collocation in a conversation. They might produce a chunk of language like ‘long distance’ instead of ‘long way’ to describe this concept. On the other hand, if they learn these collocations as chunks of language, this productive problem is avoided. In addition to determining if an aspect of vocabulary is opaque for language learners, instructors should consider their students’ needs and level along with the teachability and frequency of the target structures when identifying groups of words more suitable for explicit instruction. While I only employed two such aspects of vocabulary during this study, it is likely that for each different English proficiency level many more categories of words exist which would be suitable for explicit instruction. Language teachers should view vocabulary from this perspective when determining the content and approach for their classes.

The third finding which has relevance to the larger field of teacher education is the importance of repetition within a language course. The nature of the teaching/learning situation influences how much conscious thought an instructor needs to spend trying to incorporate repetition of targeted vocabulary into their curriculum. The more exposure a language learner has to the target language, the less important repetition becomes. For example, learners studying at an intensive language school in an L2 speaking country will be exposed to a large amount of input and the repetition of targeted vocabulary will be an organic process. However, in an EFL setting in which the students only receive a small amount of exposure to the target language (similar to this study), instructors need to be deliberate in incorporating repetition into their classes. The students supported this belief through their responses on the previous vocabulary experiences questionnaire. While they were specifically addressing vocabulary instruction when they endorsed repetition, this concept likely applies to all aspects of English. Furthermore, the students in this study made the greatest improvements in the third reflective cycle, which had the most repetition of the delexicalized verbs. However, it is not possible to quantify the impact repetition had on the

students’ performance compared to previous reflective cycles, given that this cycle also used a homework assignment and speaking activities while reflective cycle two did not. In spite of that, the repetition of the delexicalized verb collocations throughout the intervention likely contributed to the students’ improved performance on the summative spoken assessment. Language classes would become more effective if instructors design several activities which elicit the targeted vocabulary and spread these activities over several classes.

This study had a specific focus on two types of collocations, but the findings yielded insight into the larger field of vocabulary acquisition. This study produced evidence that explicit instruction is an effective way to teach certain groups of vocabulary, that students benefit from a focus on collocations, and that repeatedly exposing students to the target language aids in its acquisition. Education programs should include these three concepts when instructing future teachers on how to design vocabulary components within a well- balanced language curriculum.