Volume 6-1 March 2010. | home |

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Authors
Esmaeel Ali Salimi (Ph.D.) Mofid University, Iran
Mansoor Tavakoli (Ph.D.) University of Isfahan, Iran
Saeed Ketabi (Ph.D.) University of Isfahan, Iran

Title
The Effect of Noticing on the Judgment of Lexical Collocations: The Case of Language Proficiency and Complexity of Patterns

Bio Data
Esmaeel Ali Salimi is assistant professor at Mofid University, Qom, Iran. He has published numerous articles in the area of English language teaching and learning. His main area of interest is SLA.

Mansoor Tavakoli is assistant professor at the University of Isfahan, Iran. He has published many articles in various journals in the area of English language teaching and
learning. His main areas of interest are Language testing and Research methodology.

Saeed Ketabi is assistant professor at the University of Isfahan, Iran. He has published numerous articles in the area of English language teaching and learning. His main areas of interest are Teaching methodology and Materials development.

Abstract
This study aims at investigating how the judgment of collocational patterns is affected by noticing and whether the effect of noticing is mediated by collocational complexity and proficiency level. Four levels of attention were studied: (1) semantic processing; (2) memorization for recall; (3) rule given; (4) rule given plus negative evidence. 100 Iranian EFL learners with two different language proficiency levels participated in this study. The target
linguistic items were four partially artificial English verbs, which displayed two degrees of collocational complexity. Within each proficiency level, participants were randomly assigned to one of the four conditions and received a three-day treatment. On the fourth day, all the participants took a test that consisted of two parts: (1) determining the basic meaning of the target verbs; (2) writing down as many noun collocates as possible for the target verbs. The results indicated that learners in the two rule-oriented
conditions outperformed those in the non-rule oriented conditions. This study was not able to detect an nteraction between attention and collocational complexity, but an interaction between noticing and proficiency level did emerge. The memorization for recall and rule given plus negative evidence conditions were less effective with Level 2 learners than with Level 4 learners.

Key words: Collocation Production, Complexity, EFL, Language Proficiency, Noticing