Cloze and Editing Tasks: Are They Effective in Teaching Lexical Collocations?

Abstract

Many recent researchers support the use of collaborative output tasks in L2 classrooms. This study compared the effects on the learning of English lexical collocations of two types of output tasks (reconstruction cloze task and reconstruction editing task). It aimed to see whether doing the tasks collaboratively led to greater knowledge of the target collocations than doing the same tasks individually and also whether the type of task would make a difference. The study was conducted in two intact intermediate adult English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) classrooms. The participants had to complete four editing tasks or four cloze tasks either individually or collaboratively, and they were asked to take a vocabulary knowledge scale test administered before and after the treatment. The results revealed that completing the tasks collaboratively (in pairs) led to a greater gain of collocation knowledge than completing them individually. The results, also, showed a significant difference between the effects of two task types, with the editing tasks being more effective than the cloze tasks in the learning of lexical collocations.