The Effect of a Program Based on the Lexical Approach on Developing English Majors' Use of Collocations

As nonnative preservice teachers of English face many difficulties when using collocations, this present study seeks to identify the areas of collocation difficulty where learners have the biggest trouble. A training program based on the practices of the lexical approach was thus developed to solve this problem. Senior English majors at two Egyptian Universities represented the sample of this study. Instruments included a test on lexical collocations, and a training program based on the practices of the lexical approach (a framework, a teacher's guide and students' worksheets). The results showed that explicit teaching of collocations through various corpus-based activities helped learners get an intuition unto the right collocates, and drastically raised their scores in the posttest.