There is more to collaborative learning than students simply sitting together working on the same task. There is also the requirement for interdependence amongst the learners. The dictogloss procedure (Wajnryb, 1990) is often given as an example of just this type of collaborative, integrated skills technique (Philp, Adams, Iwashita, 2014) where students are required to share opinions, listen to and help each other in order to complete a task. The procedure involves the exploration and reconstruction of a short text through its language features and contents by a group of students who interact orally through the sharing of their written notes. This study evaluated the effectiveness of using collaborative learning tasks as a tool to increasing students’ breadth and depth of knowledge of business vocabulary in the faculty of business administration of a Japanese university. The study compared vocabulary learning under a reading only condition to learning that was aided by the dictogloss procedure. Three levels of vocabulary knowledge (form recall, meaning recall and meaningful use) were assessed using a 60-token vocabulary list. The results support a view that collaborative tasks provide learners with varied and multiple encounters with given words that highlight different lexical features, and which can aid to develop and strengthen their vocabulary knowledge.