The explicit teaching of L2 English collocations through graphic organizers

This thesis aims to study the effect, if any, of the explicit teaching of L2 collocations through graphic organizers on upper-intermediate level Turkish prep students' L2 collocation recall and retention in a formal EFL context at the School of Foreign Languages at a state university in Turkey. In order to achieve the objectives of the study, 50 prep school students aged between 18 and 19 at the upper-intermediate level of English participated in the study and the study consisted of 1 experimental and 1 control group consisting of 25 students in each group. At the beginning of the study, students were taking general English and Reading / Writing lessons for 20 hours per week during the spring semester. The spring semester comprised two periods with 7 weeks in the 3th period and 8 weeks in the 4th period. The study was conducted at the beginning of the 3rd period and the overall study lasted for ten weeks. After the quantitative data gathered from the immediate and delayed post-tests were analysed, the current study demonstrated that teaching L2 collocations explicitly through graphic organizers had a statistically significant effect on L2 recall and retention of the prep students at the upper-intermediate level. The results show that when L2 collocations were taught to the experimental group by means of graphic organizers enhanced through visual inputs, they recalled them better and retained them in their memory far much longer than the control group students. Keywords: collocations, graphic organizers, L2 vocabulary recall, L2 vocabulary retention