The results of the statistical analyses for the first research question of the present study proved that there was a strong positive correlation between students’ knowledge of verb noun collocations and the language proficiency. The results illustrated that the development of collocational competence was in line with language skills. These findings empirically support the findings of Al-Zahrani (1998), BagherzadehHosseini and Akbarian (2007), Gitsaki(1999), Hsu and Chui (2008), Keshavarz and Salimi (2007), Koosha and Jafarpour (2006),Liao (2010), and Liu (2010) that there is a high positive correlation between learners’ language proficiency and collocational competence.
The results of Pearson product moment correlation supported the claim that the development of collocational competence was in line with other language skills. It is interesting to note that although collocations are not taught to students explicitly at that university in Iran, students seem to acquire collocations. This situation may make it possible to infer that students learn collocations implicitly through the exposure to English language they receive in classroom and informal situation throughout their four years in the institute.
Based on the findings of this study, knowledge of collocations can contribute to the learners’ comprehension and production. It means that a word can be best learned with which it associates because learners can remember the word with its associations or collocations. By memorising the collocations, students become aware of lexical restrictions that help them to use them as pre-packaged building blocks.
Moreover, in vocabulary learning and teaching, the significant role of collocations should be emphasised. Seal (1991) regards collocations as a vital characteristic of vocabulary knowledge and states that what should be offered to students is collocational knowledge not individual words. EFL/ESL teachers should make their students aware of lexical collocations because such awareness has been considered an essential aspect of language learning (Brown, 1974; Coznett, 2000; Lewis, 2000). The present study provides empirical support to this view and also to Sinclair’s (1997) idea about the importance of the idiom principle. This leads to the principle of language use which is pedagogically at the heart of teaching and testing of language competence and should be used for the design of appropriate teaching materials and for the methodology of classroom instruction.
The study shows that there is a relationship between the English knowledge and collocational proficiency of Iranian students, yet future bigger scale studies may be necessary to be performed. In this study, the c-test could measure the verb noun collocations, but
Iranian EFL Journal 237 another one should be designed to measure not only lexical collocations but also grammatical collocations. Yet much has to be done on the role of collocations in second or foreign language acquisitions, especially on the relationships with other language skills in EFL conditions.
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Iranian EFL Journal 241 Title
The Impact of Trilingualism on Spatial Reasoning Authors
Saeed Khojaste Nam, (M.A.) Iran University of Science and Technology
Khalil Tazik, (Ph.D. candidate) Islamic Azad University of Ramhormoz
Hossein Baniasad (B.A.) Payam Noor University of Ahwaz
Biodata
Saeed Khojaste Nam M.A. graduate of TEFL from Iran university of Science and Technology, Tehran ,Iran and a lecturer in Susanguerd Payam Noor university. His Research Interests include Cognition of bilinguals and Multilingualism, and Discourse analysis
Khalil Tazik is a Ph.D. student at Ilam University. He has published many articles and taken part in some national conferences. His main research interests include discourse analysis and psycholinguistics.
Hossein Baniasad B.A. graduate in Translation from Payam Noor University of Ahwaz, Iran. His research interests include cognitive studies of language learners and multilingualism, sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics.
Abstract
Recently, multilingualism as a very important social and cultural norm has been of extensive interest and attention all over the world. Scholars have investigated multilingual individuals and communities from different perspectives to find out how multilinguality affects peoples' cognitive abilities. The present study, in which 105 male and female trilinguals and monolinguals participated, attempted to enter a new arena in multilinguals' abilities which is spatial abilities and find out if there is any significant difference between the tri and monolingual participants in their performance on the spatial ability test. Analyzing the collected data from the groups through the use of spatial ability test battery, it has been revealed that trilinguals outperformed monolinguals in the test of spatial abilities.
Keywords: Trilingualism, Spatial ability, Iran, Multilinguals' cognition
Iranian EFL Journal 242 1. Introduction
Most of the world population knows to communicate by means of two, three, or more languages and only a small portion of the world's people are monolingual. Multilingualism as a norm for the majority of people is present in almost every country in all classes and age groups. Commonly, it is difficult to find a society that is genuinely monolingual.
In addition to Singapore with four state languages, today there are 38 countries in which two languages as the state languages and four other countries have three state languages (Kornakov, 1997). As well, countries such as Canada, Sweden, and India are officially bi or multilingual and their speakers "enjoy socio educational benefits provided for them by the central government" (Hameedy, 2001, p.2) without facing any difficulty in regard to their multilinguality. Of course in a considerable number of cases the state language is not the language spoken by the majority of population or multilinguals who live in countries in which everything is at the service of the state language. Thus, most of these individuals usually receive very little or no support in achieving their real multilinguality. In the beginning of the 20th century bilingualism or multlingualism in general was considered as a bad habit, a sign of suffering from a language handicap (Darcy, 1953) or the cause of linguistic and mental confusion (Saer, 1923). However, in recent studies the trend has mostly changed in favor of multilingualism and a number of studies has suggested and proved the opposite and indicated that being a bi or tri or more-lingualism has beneficial effects on the cognitive abilities. A significant books and papers that look deeper into various aspects of multilingualism especially bilingualism and trilingualism have appeared., MacNab (1979) does his research on creative thinking in bilinguals, Cook (1995) on meta-linguistic awareness and multlingualism, Jessner (2006) on language awareness in multilinguals, Cenoz (2009) on multilingual education and some other studies related to the attention system of multilinguals.going through these studies, assumptions such as multilinguals are better language learners than monolinguals, learning a third language has an indirect effect on mental awareness, multilinguals can outperform their monolingual peers in an IQ test, have been discussed, proved and disproved. Meanwhile, there are still plenty of myths about the negative effects of this phenomenon on children's mental development and capabilities and surprisingly some educators caution against the use of two or more languages in children, claiming that knowing two or more languages causes cognitive, social, and emotional damage to children (Hakuta, 1986). These claims sometimes changes the relationship between the multilnguality and cognition to a real dilemma and make it so tremendous that even today it
Iranian EFL Journal 243 captures the attention of scholars, scientists, psychologists, and even policy makers more than before. However, in our country, contrary to its high diversity this phenomenon has not been studied appropriately so far. Families in Iran have not been provided with sufficient authentic sufficient information whether multilingualism impacts their children positively or negatively in the field of education.
Therefore, it appears that today studying the effects of multilingualism on individual cognition, intelligent, attention can have far reaching and essential implications for language policy and teaching, especially in our country.
This research was an attempt to find out if trilingualism, which is one component of multilingualism, has a positive or hindering influence on trilinguals. Naturally its findings can help educators and policy makers to decide whether they should provide and promote multilingual education or proficiency in three languages should not be a primary educational goal in the classroom. In fact, in the present paper the state of the art on trilingual development and its consequences for the adults' cognitive development are first reviewed and discussed at some length. We then review the spatial ability in trilinguals.