Learning vocabulary through collocating on quizlet

Abstract

The difficulty in learning vocabulary is a problem that lies in not anchoring the new items to relevant established entities in cognitive structure. Different categories of associations have been reported to aid facilitating vocabulary acquisition. Collocating vocabulary items is a type of association that is considered to be more efficient in retrieval. The present study sought to investigate whether collocating the lexical items on Quizlet can facilitate acquisition of the vocabulary items, and whether it is likely to be more effective than learning decontextualized individual words. In so doing, 70 upper-intermediate English as a foreign language (EFL) learners with homogenous knowledge of vocabulary were conveniently assigned into two groups: the learners in the first group were assigned a list of vocabulary items with their synonyms in English, while the learners in the other group were assigned the identical vocabulary items with their frequent collocations written in complete sentences. The targeted collocations were verb-nouns, propositional verbs, and noun-nouns. The assignment continued for two months. At the end, an independent sample t-test applied on the scores achieved from a posttest indicated a significant difference in scores of the control group and that of the experimental group. This study sheds light to the significance of contextualizing a lexical item with collocations through which acquisition of vocabulary item is enhanced.