A COMPARATIVE SEMANTIC-SYNTACTIC INVESTIGATION INTO THE CHARACTERISTIC OF ADJECTIVAL COLLOCATIONS IN IRANIAN EFL STUDENTS' ACADEMIC WRITING

The present study investigated the effect of adjectival collocations on Iranian EFL students' academic writing. This study would try to determine whether or not using adjectival collocation in writing might enhance Iranian EFL students' academic writing. The total population of 100 students participated in the study. 60 sample were selected by OPT. The participants were female and male, ranging from 20 to 35 years old. Their data were collected by giving a descriptive writing topic to Islamic Azad university of Rasht, Branch, Iran, English Translation students in fourth semester and then were analyzed to find out about the distribution and frequency of the application of adjectives in their work. Writing test was done to survey a students' grammatical and lexical knowledge. Writing test defined students' problems in collocation. Writing test was done as pretest in two groups. T-test was done between pretest scores of two groups. Then for ten sessions, adjective collocations were taught in the experimental group. After 10 sessions writing test was done in two groups. The scores of two groups were calculated by Essay Scoring Rubric (pretest-posttest). T-test was done between posttest scores of two groups. Finally, Paired T-test was done between pretest and posttest scores of experimental group because of the survey of treatment effect was efficient or not. Null hypotheses were rejected based on the aforementioned analysis and statistical procedures. As the result of the study indicated that there existed a relationship between learning adjectival collocations and improvement of academic writing ability.