• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.141-160
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• 2010

This study aims to analyze the effects of explicit lexical collocation instruction on grammatical collocation knowledge, by focusing on the preposition collocations. The forty participants consisting of twenty men and twenty women are currently freshmen English majors in college. They responded to the questionnaire on their basic lexical learning strategies in pre-post tests, and carried out a lexical collocation test and a preposition collocation test as pre-post tests. They took the open class on the lexical collocations(LC) 5 times, but they did not concretely study any grammatical collocations(GC). Each test is analyzed and compared with pre-post tests by SPSS 12.0. From all the analyses, it was first revealed that most students who didn't know about the concepts, types and uses of collocations became aware of them after the class. The effects of the lexical collocations on the lexical collocation knowledge were quite revealing. Second, the correlations between the lexical collocations and grammatical collocations were not significant, although relations among the lexical collocations were quite significant. Finally, some suggestions for methods of mixed lexical chunks instruction are made for students' productive skills. Also, it is suggested that more profound attention should be paid to giving direct instructions on the basis of the lexico-grammatical continuum between LC and GC.