THE IMPACT OF USING NOTICING REFORMULATION TASKS ON IRANIAN LOW-INTERMEDIATE EFL LEARNERS' RETENTION OF COLLOCATIONS

The present quasi-experimental study reports the classroom tasks that encourage noticing and conscious attention to collocations, which were a strand of an English language school spoken course in Iran. The study follows a two-group pretest, treatment, post-test design and focuses on the different ways in which Noticing-Reformulation tasks are provided and their relationship with the retention of collocations. The study documented 40 low-intermediate Iranian EFL learners with the same proficiency level measured by an OPT test and two non-native English teachers. The participants were randomly assigned to an experimental and control group which were exposed to Noticing-Reformulation tasks along with stimulated recall session and traditional methods respectively to determine whether there was any development in the long-term retention of collocations. Analysis of the data obtained from independent sample t-tests along with the Pearson correlation coefficient tests indicates that the participants of the experimental group noticed the mismatches between their interlanguage and the target language, and that there were significant quantitative and statistical differences in the output of participants from the two different groups, with learners who participated in the experimental group outperforming and incorporating significantly more retention of collocations in the immediate and delayed post-test than learners from the control group.