the present study sought to examine whether a task-based approach could have an impact on raising awareness of collocations. moreover, it sought to investigate the facilitative role of consciousness-raising tasks of collocations in the communicative instances of use. to this end, 68 intermediate learners of english were selected via a placement test. the participants were taught with classroom strategies of collocations along with their regular instruction related to four skills of listening, reading, speaking, and writing. the data was collected through pre-posttest assessments and analyzed by paired sample t-test procedure. the significant differences between pretests and posttests revealed that task-based instruction is an effective approach that can contribute to learning english collocation by iranian efl learners. moreover, students were asked to perform some scored consciousness-raising tasks every two weeks to raise their awareness and assess their developmental process in the course of instruction. the data was then fed into spss and repeated measures of anova were run to analyze the results. the results displayed that students were made aware of collocations in their course. overall, this study confirms the benefits of task-based approach in general and consciousness-raising tasks in particular to teaching collocations.