collocations and efl learners' writing performance

Research on teaching/learning collocations has recently increased due to their reportedly significant role in enhancing efl learners' communicative competence. in line with this trend, the present paper employs a quasi-experimental research methodology aimed at investigating the effect of explicit teaching of verb collocations on students' writing performance. to do so, two intact classes (control and experimental), including sixty 12th-grade female high school students, were chosen to act as the participants of the study. they went through eight sessions of treatment, which included teaching 40 verb collocations through flash cards, a monolingual dictionary, and a vocabulary notebook. the verb collocations were culled from the students’ textbook, vision 3. a one-way ancova was run to determine statistically the effect of teaching verb collocations on enhancing efl students’ writing performance. the obtained results indicated that the explicit teaching of verb collocations had a significant effect on efl students’ writing performance after controlling for their pre-test scores, f (1, 77) =80/212, p <0.05.  the pedagogical implications of the study have been presented throughout the paper. the findings of the study have some pedagogical and practical implications for efl students, teachers, and curriculum designers. considering the fact that most of the efl learners, particularly at the initial stages of their language learning, are not well aware of these collocations, it seems that raising an awareness of collocations would improve their language skills.