The effect of corpus-assisted language teaching on academic collocation acquisition by Iranian advanced EFL learners

Purpose This study attempts to evaluate the effect of the corpus-based inductive teaching approach with multiple academic corpora (PICA, CAEC and Oxford Corpus of Academic English) and conventional deductive teaching approach (i.e., multiple-choice items, filling the gap, matching and underlining) on learning academic collocations by Iranian advanced EFL learners (students learning English as a foreign language). Design/methodology/approach This is a quasi-experimental, quantitative and qualitative study. Findings The result showed the experimental group outperformed significantly compared with the control group. The experimental group also shared their perception of the advantages and disadvantages of the corpus-assisted language teaching approach. Originality/value Despite growing progress in language pedagogy, methodologies and language curriculum design, there are still many teachers who experience poor performance in their students' vocabulary, whether in comprehension or production. In Iran, for example, even though mandatory English education begins at the age of 13, which is junior and senior high school, students still have serious problems in language production and comprehension when they reach university levels.