Raising EFL learners` awereness of verb-noun collocations through chunking to extend their knowledge of familiar nouns

Research in vocabulary has received much attention recently due to the recognition of a need that a larger lexicon of L2 is a prerequisite to effective communication. Corpus linguistics such as the COBUILD project has shown us that vocabulary is not consisted only of single words but a much wider part of real language includes multi-word units; polywords, collocations, fixed, semi-fixed utterances etc. The purpose of this study is to see to what extent Turkish learners of English chunk collocations i.e. word partnerships in texts, and whether a focus on these partnerships through an awareness-raising activity makes any contribution to learners' productive/receptive vocabulary use. The study, in particular, aims to prove that frequent verb collocates of familiar nouns escape notice through reading on the assumption that such words are already known and do not need further attention. To this end, a native speaker of English formed two texts including common verb + noun collocations under the topics of Education and Traffic with reference to Oxford Collocations Dictionary (2002). Then, one productive and one receptive test were formed, each comprising 25 items, 13 of which were found in the two texts. The study was conducted with two classes of 36 Upper- Intermediate level students, 18 of them being in the experimental group and the other half in the control group. The results of the study revealed that the experimental group that was trained in chunking collocations in texts scored higher in both forms of posttests. in