Vocabulary has been a neglected area in foreign language teaching for a long time. In recent years this trend has changed and vocabulary teaching has gained more attention. It is widely believed that vocabulary instruction should shift its main focus from individual words to multi-word lexical units, namely, collocations. The importance of collocational teaching is approved in both production and comprehension of second and foreign language. Nevertheless, this issue has not gained its real value in Iran. The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of collocational teaching of vocabulary on Iranian EFL students’ vocabulary retention and production. More specifically, the paper addresses these three questions: 1. Does collocational teaching of vocabularies have any effect on the Iranian EFL students’ learning of vocabularies? 2. Does collocational teaching of vocabularies have any effect on the retention of vocabularies for the Iranian EFL learners? 3. Does collocational teaching of vocabularies have any effect on the Iranian EFL learners’ language production (writing), i.e., changing passive vocabulary into active one? In this study, 32 female intermediate students were divided into experimental (n =15) and control (n= 17) groups. During the five sessions of the treatment 35 vocabularies were instructed to both groups, while the experimental group received the collocations of the words as well. After the five sessions of the treatment and with the intervals of two weeks, three vocabulary post-tests and one writing test were administered to both groups. Data analysis approves that both the students’ retention of words and their quality of writing in the experimental group were enhanced by collocational teaching of vocabularies. Furthermore, the vast applications of this kind of teaching is discussed in various areas such as improving four language skills, translation, curriculum designing, etc.

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