Abstract

This study explores the effectiveness of using an overhead projector to display guessing games and that of printed dictionaries in teaching collocations to Arabic-speaking English as a foreign language (EFL) learners. The study focused particularly on the acquisition of English grammatical collocations or, more precisely, colligations. A pre-test and delayed post-test approach was employed for assessing students’ knowledge of collocations before and after the experiment. Forty EFL tenth grade students studying at a school in Amman, Jordan, took part in this study. The learners were divided equally into two groups: Group A (the treatment group) and Group B (the control group). The treatment group was taught collocations using a prediction activity involving an overhead projector that displayed guessing games illustrating the collocations; the control group was taught the collocations using the traditional technique of printed dictionaries. The findings revealed that teaching through an overhead projector and guessing games results in a better learning of collocations than using dictionaries, as demonstrated by the results of the paired sample t-test. The findings also showed that the type of grammatical collocation that students found most challenging was the noun + preposition type owing to poor vocabulary knowledge and negative transfer from L1. The study concluded with some pedagogical implications.