Learning Collocations through Attention-Drawing Techniques: A Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis

When second language (L2) learners read an L2 text, they tend to prioritize text comprehension and text meaning over specific language forms (Peters, 2007a), as a consequence of which many grammatical as well as lexical language features in the input remain unnoticed. Although recent research (Laufer, 2005; Peters, 2007b; Peters et al., 2009) has demonstrated the positive effects of attention-drawing techniques on word learning, it has focused predominantly on recognition and recall of the meaning of individual words. In spite of the growing interest in the use of multiword units by foreign language learners, far fewer studies have been carried out into techniques that may foster the acquisition of these multiword units (Bishop, 2004; Boers et al., 2006). This chapter reports on an exploratory study that aims to examine how an attention-drawing technique may facilitate recall of both individual lexical items and collocations. The technique under investigation is a vocabulary task: a general versus a specific, collocation-oriented task.