The present study tried to investigate the effect of implicit and explicit instructions of collocations of delexicalized verbs ‘make’, ‘do’, ‘give’, ‘take’ and ‘have’. After administering an OPT, 60 high school students were selected as the participants of this study. The sample was divided into two groups of 30. The first experimental group was taught collocations implicitly through reading the texts and answering the comprehension questions and discussing the topics. The second experimental group was taught collocations explicitly through reading the texts and doing focus-on-form tasks. A collocation test consisting of 50 items was used both as the pre-test and the post-test. The results of the OPT were compared through an independent-sample t-test. The pre-tests were compared through an independent-sample t-test and the post-tests were compared through a Mann-Whitney U test. The pre-test and the post-test of the implicit and the explicit groups were compared through one Willcoxon Signed Rank Test and one paired-sample t-test respectively. The data analysis showed a recession in the implicit group performance in the post-test. However, the explicit group results showed a significant progress from the pre-test to the post-test. It was concluded that implicit teaching not only was not so fruitful in acquiring verb-noun collocations of the delexicalized verbs, but also can be counterproductive and confuse the learners. According to this study, the explicit teaching is effective in helping the learners recognize the collocations of the delexicalized verbs. The results of this study can help teachers, material designers and curriculum developers in selecting and presenting collocations in the most fruitful ways.
