Comparative Effects of Reading Aloud and Reading-while-Listening to a Short Story on Incongruent Collocation Learning in Young Learners

This study investigates the comparative effects of reading aloud and reading-while listening to a short story on young EFL learners’ acquisition of incongruent collocations. 60 sixth-grade primary school students were assigned to either a reading aloud or a reading-while-listening group for a two-week treatment. They were exposed to 12 target incongruent collocations embedded in a short story, and their collocational knowledge was assessed via form recall (productive knowledge) and meaning recognition (receptive knowledge) tests at pre, immediate, and delayed test phases. The results revealed that for receptive knowledge, both instructional methods were effective, with no significant difference found between the groups. For productive knowledge, however, a significant time-group interaction was observed. The reading aloud group significantly outperformed the reading-while-listening group on the immediate test (p < .05), although this advantage was not maintained on the delayed test. These results indicate that the articulation involved in reading aloud, likely attributable to the production effect, offers an initial advantage for encoding the challenging forms of incongruent collocations. Overall, the study demonstrates that the effectiveness of each method depends on the type of lexical knowledge targeted and suggests that reading aloud can be strategically employed to help young learners overcome the initial barrier of producing incongruent collocations.