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Comparing The Effectiveness Of Phrase-Focused Exercises. A Partial Replication Of Boers, Demecheleer, Coxhead, And Webb (2014), Frank Boers, Tu Cam Thi Dang, Brian Strong

Education Publications

In a recent article, Boers, Demecheleer, Coxhead, and Webb (2014) deplored the lack of effectiveness for the learning of verb-noun collocations of a number of exercise formats which they sampled from EFL textbooks and put to the test in a series of quasi-experimental trials. The authors called for further investigations into possible improvements to such exercise formats. The present article is a response to that call. It also addresses methodological issues which may have affected Boers et al.’s (2014) findings and which rendered their conclusions tentative. In the quasi-experiment reported here, EFL learners were given fill-in-the-blank exercises on verb-noun phrases …