TEACHING COLLOCATIONS THROUGH SHORT STORIES AT THE SECONDARY SCHOOL LEVEL

The use of collocations is the key to fluency, accuracy and genuineness in the use of a second language, but collocations are another vocabulary feature that ESL learners of the secondary level find challenging, because vocabulary is taught separately. This paper will discuss whether teaching English collocations, with the use of short stories, in the secondary school level, is an efficient method and how learners perceive this teaching method. The study involved a mixed method pre-test, post-test design that took place within eight weeks involving a total of 56 secondary school students in two schools in Vehari, Pakistan and were aged 13-16. The intervention consisted of explicit and contextualized teaching of target collocations in form of selected short stories with the help of pre-reading, while-reading, and post-reading tasks. pre-and post-tests constructed by the researcher were used to gather quantitative data, which were analyzed with the help of the descriptive statistics and a paired-samples t-test. Findings indicated that there was a strong improvement in collocational knowledge of students with a mean score of 6.82 changing to 13.20. The difference was statistically relevant (t = -25.727, p <.001), which means that the method based on short stories is effective. It indicates that short stories give a rich and realistic context of learning collocation, which may be readily incorporated into ESL lessons at the secondary school level.