A Systematic Literature Review of Academic Research on EFL Learners' Use of Multi-Word Units (MWUs) in Jordan
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17507/tpls.1507.30Keywords:
learning/teaching MWUs, systematic literature review, Jordanian contexts, EFL Jordanian learnersAbstract
This study provides a systematic literature review (SLR) of academic research on learning/teaching of Multi-Word Units (MWUs) in the Jordanian context. A content analysis of the 16 most influential papers in this field is conducted to identify the important research attributes, such as data characteristics, methodologies, and major findings. The results show that the available literature on MWUs is mostly limited to teaching methods and strategies, unfamiliarity with the collocations, poor knowledge of MWUs, semantic difficulties, and the role of contextual information as a contributing factor. For future directions, it would be interesting to investigate ways in which teachers might motivate EFL students to get engaged in activities that support MWU learning. Also, it is important to design assignments, exercises, and activities that could facilitate MWU learning and identify multilingual MWU learning techniques, based on corpus-based research validating the types of MWUs which are frequently used by native speakers.
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