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ions, the majority of them to date havefocused on providing descriptive account of learner knowledge of collocation (Granger, 1998;Nesselhauf, 2003). Only a few empirical studies have addressed the issue of how collocationscan be effectively taught. Of the few studies which do specifically investigate the effects ofdifferent tasks on collocation, most are concerned with purely vocabulary exercises inintentional learning condition, and in these studies learners practice discrete lexical items innon-communicative, non-authentic language tasks (e.g. Sun & wang, 2003; Webb &Kagimoto, 2009; Walter & Woodford, 2010). Till now, very few studies concern theacquisition of collocations in incidental reading (e.g. Laufer & Girsai, 2008; Webb &Kagimoto, 2011).It is generally accepted that much of second language vocabulary is acquired incidentallyduring reading for meaning and that there is considerable empirical support for this claim(Pitts & Krashen, 1989; Laufer, 2001; Waring & Takaki, 2003). There is mounting evidencethat incidental vocabulary acquisition without any enhancement activities is slow and resultsin small gains (Hulstijn, 1992; Knight, 1994; Paribakht & Wesche, 1997). To speed up the rateof lexical acquisition, a variety of enhancement activities are combined with reading in manystudies on vocabulary acquisition and the results show that these enhancement activities dobetter facilitate vocabulary learning than reading without enhancement activities do (Hulstijn,1992; knight, 1994; laufer, 2003; Makoto, 2006; Laufer & Girsai, 2008; Lin & Huang, 2008).Of these enhancement activities, glossing has attracted the attention of many researchers andmost of their studies investigating the effectiveness of glossing show that not only doesglossing contribute to reading comprehension, it also facilitates vocabulary acquisition (Davis,1989; Nagata,1999; Rott & Camerron, 2002; Rott, 2005). In the past decade, manyresearchers have shifted their emphasis from gloss effects to gloss types (Nagata, 1999;Watanabe, 1997). Hulstijn (1992) introduced a new type of glossing, multiple-choice gloss.Many previous studies examining the effects of multiple-choice gloss and single gloss onvocabulary learning reported that multiple-choice glosses outperformed single glosses(Hulstijn, 1992; Rott & Cameron, 2002).Lewis (2001) holds that if collocations are not actively introduced, it may be weeks,months or years before students meet those collocations and therefore the process ofdeepening understanding is delayed. Such being the case, gloss may be a good choice ifteachers want to search for an effective way to introduce collocations. Since multiple-choiceglosses were reported to facilitate vocabulary acquisition, attempts should be made toexamine whether it is still the case with collocation learning. However, to my knowledge,previous studies were limited to the realm of gloss effects on individual lexical items, andnone was devoted to the acquisition of collocation. Therefore, in order to provide morethoughts for English teachers to ponder over while selecting effective ways of teachingcollocation, this study was designed to investigate the effects of multiple-choice gloss andsingle gloss on collocation learning. As previous study (Chen, 2002) reports that L2 glossesare usually longer and more time-consuming than L1 glosses, in order not to make participantspend too much time on reading glasses and normal reading in