Teaching new words using collocations has been acknowledged as an effective way in vocabulary classes

2.3 Vocabulary Comprehension
Rivers (1983) indicated that the importance of acquiring a huge enough vocabulary because with a weak vocabulary, students would not use efficiently the forms and functions which they learned for comprehensible speech. Gass and Selinker (1994) stated the same as describing the sentences that have grammar errors, can be understood with the ones, which contain lexical misuse, have little possibility of being understood. They gave as a sample claiming the sentences below: “Could you please tell me where is the city cinema?” and “I feel sorry for people who live in the suburbs.” The first example’s structure should be “Could you please tell me where the city cinema is?” and has a grammatical misuse however can still be understandable. Nevertheless, the next sentence is used in a lexically incorrect way. However, here the word “suburb” meant the slum places and feeling sorry for people lived there, and it could be easily inferred and misunderstood for feeling sorry for people who live in suburbs since they live far from the city and they have to drive to city. In such sentences, only one error can change the meaning and turn into another direction that surely speaker did not intend.
From the samples, it can be seen that vocabulary acquisition plays an important role in learners’ conveying meaning. Laufer (1997) agreed, “No text comprehension is possible, either in one’s native language or in a foreign language, without understanding the text’s vocabulary” (p.20). Haynes and Baker admitted that learners need enough vocabulary for fully understanding rather than other strategies (as cited in Laufer, 1997). Such opinions highlight that lexical problems ought to be attentively taken into consideration as they can complicate the comprehension of a language.
According to Nattinger (1988), vocabulary comprehension demands learning new words and keeping them on mind while production demands regain them from recollection and using them in appropriate situations. Hence, our aim in teaching vocabulary should be to strengthen this memory storage. According to Nattinger one way to strengthen storage in memory is using mnemonic techniques, which enable students to learn a word in the target language by associating it with its translation in the native language in a special way. Another method is paired associates in which the learner correlates a visual image with a new word. Teaching words in collocations, on the other hand, has been neglected for many years and recently it has gained importance (Hill, 2000). Furthermore, researchers, teachers and others involved in foreign language learning are paying special attention to foreign language vocabulary acquisition (Zu, 2009). It is believed that having a large and varied vocabulary is the sign of communicative competence and it is one of the central aspects of language learning (McCrostie, 2007). Like grammar, vocabulary knowledge is one of the elements of language (Nation & Waring, 1997). It should be seen as an essential part of learning a foreign language since it paves the way to communication. That is, even a sufficient knowledge of vocabulary alone could be enough for a relative degree of communication to occur (Wallace, 1982). Moreover, Celce–Murcia and Rosensweig (1989) have the same opinion that vocabulary should be accepted as a central element in language instruction from the beginning stages. They more ever confirm that having an adequate stock of vocabulary with a minimum number of structures usually helps the learner more not only in reading comprehension, but also in attaining more efficient communication than having a perfect command of structures with an inadequate amount of vocabulary.
Many approaches and techniques to teaching and learning vocabulary have appeared with the recognition of the importance of vocabulary, and collocation is merely one of those techniques. It is a widely accepted idea that collocations are very important part of knowledge of second language acquisition and they are essential to non-native speakers of English in order to speak or write fluently and accurately (Jaén, 2007). Skrzypek (2009) indicates the significance of collocation by asserting that one of the criteria for knowing a word knows other words with which it keeps company. As Shin and Nation (2008) explain one of the reasons as to why learners and teachers should be interested in collocations being that collocations boosts learners’ language fluency and ensure native-like selection. Nattinger (1988) claimed that collocations could assist learners in committing these words to memory and defining the semantic area of a word, and could allow learners to know and to foresee what kinds of words would be found together.