Enhancing EFL Learners' Delexical Collocation Knowledge Through Contextual Reading and Digital Tools

The present study aims to investigate the impact of contextual reading and digital tools on enhancing Turkish EFL students’ receptive and productive knowledge of delexical verb-noun collocations. Twenty-four Turkish EFL students, who were enrolled in an English Preparatory School of a state university in Türkiye, took part in the study. The study adopted a one-group pre-test/post-test design with an intervention stage, which included a contextual reading text and Quizlet activities that target delexical verb-noun collocations. The tests were composed of two parts, fill-in-the-blanks task and paragraph writing task, which aimed to evaluate receptive and productive knowledge of the students, respectively. The results indicated that the students showed statistically significant improvements not only in receptive task but also in productive task. Furthermore, Cohen’s d was calculated as 1.1787 for receptive knowledge while it was even higher in productive knowledge (Cohen’s d=1.3077), revealing that the intervention had a large effect on students’ retention. Therefore, it can be concluded that providing students with delexical verb-noun collocations in context and scaffolding them through engaging activities play a significant and an effective role in their receptive and productive skills.