چكيده به لاتين
Abstract
Research in the area of collocations has been the concern of a considerable number of scholars for more than three decades. So far a lot of studies have been carried out to look into collocations from different aspects, which have shed light on the importance of collocations and resulted in various taxonomies. This study aimed at investigating the association between the correct use of collocations and the general writing marks of the candidates in the second writing task as well as predicting what type of collocations, unique, strong, medium strength, and weak (Lewis, 2000) correlates with candidates’ performance. 100 IELTS candidates were asked to write essays on three topics and their writings were holistically marked on Brown and Baily (1984) scale. After computing a correlation between the total scores of the writings and the percentage of the correct use of collocations, the results suggested that there is a very high correlation between writing scores and collocation percentage (r = .81). It was also found out that collocation scores can predict the total writing scores by 66%, which is considered a large effect size. The second conclusion drawn was that medium strength collocations significantly and positively correlates with Iranian IELTS candidates’ second writing task (by 10% of variance), which is considered a medium effect size. The conclusions underlined the importance of allocating class time to teaching medium strength collocations rather than the other collocation types.
