Impact of Collocation Instruction on Kuwaiti ESL/EFL Learners’ Reading Comprehension

Abstract

Collocation refers to a group of two or more words that often go together or located in a certain manner in speech and writing. This research was intended to observe the impact of collocation instruction on Kuwaiti ESL/ EFL learners’ reading comprehension. The setting of this pragmatic research was English Language Unit (ELU), Kuwait University. For this purpose, 80 Arabic-speaking English learners, both male and female, at intermediate level were selected from English Language Unit. The participants’ age ranged 22-25 years. Their level of English was determined on the basis of their scores on Nelson Proficiency Test which was administered at the same time in four different classes i.e., two classes as the experimental group while the other two classes as the control group for the purpose of recent research. Some participants, however, were disqualified from the data analysis because a few of them didn’t show up in the pre-experimental test, while others missed some of the sessions in the experimental stage, or failed to answer the questionnaire. Due to these reasons, the participants in the experimental group and the control group were not equal. Finally, there were 32 students in the experimental group and 35 students in the respective control group. Therefore, the final total number of the sample was 67 subjects. The statistics for this study were collected from 67 participants. The paired-sample t-test showed very interesting results. The participants in the experimental group performed better than the participants in the control group in reading comprehension test. This research verified that collocation instruction, before the test is administered, had an important impact on Kuwaiti ESL/ EFL learners’ reading comprehension.