Effects of Pedagogical Interventions on Korean Middle School Students’ Learning of Verb-Noun Collocations

While collocation has been widely acknowledged as part and parcel of language, particular types of collocation (e.g., verb-noun collocation) are found to be troublesome for L2 learners. This study examined the impact of two pedagogical interventions, which are interventions on alliteration and L1 incongruity, on Korean middle school students’ deliberate study of verb-noun collocations. Three intact classes of 78 students were assigned to one of three groups (i.e., intervention on alliteration, intervention on L1 incongruity, and control group) and studied 20 target collocations. The results showed that the intervention on L1 incongruity was significantly effective followed by the intervention on alliteration in the immediate posttest, indicating that both interventions had an impact on collocation learning compared to non-intervention group in the short term. Also, the intervention on L1 incongruity was found to be fruitful in the acquisition of focused L1 incongruent collocations in the immediate posttest, but with no significant impact in the delayed posttest due to high attrition rate. Lastly, the study found that the overall trend of learning gains from both L2 proficiency groups was similar regardless of the types of intervention.