Acquisition of collocations under different glossing modalities and the mediating role of learners’ perceptual learning style

Abstract The current study investigated how different glossing modalities (textual and auditory) and learners’ perceptual learning style (visual and auditory) influenced collocation learning. A total of 212 college students in China were first assigned to either a visual or auditory group based on their performance on a perceptual learning style questionnaire. Each style group was subsequently subdivided into three groups who were exposed to a series of reading texts containing 15 unknown collocations under one of the glossing conditions: textual glosses, auditory glosses or no glosses (control). Results of the study indicated that both textual, and that auditory glosses led to gains in productive and receptive collocation knowledge and auditory glosses were more effective than textual glosses. In addition, this study provided empirical evidence that perceptual learning style has a moderating effect on collocational learning. The auditory learners in the auditory glossing condition showed the highest rate of collocational learning among all treatment subgroups.