Classroom concordancing and English academic lecture comprehension: an implication of data-driven learning

Abstract

The purpose of the present study was to investigate if following data-driven learning (DDL) to raise the learners’ awareness of discourse organizers through concordancing improves their comprehension of English academic lectures. To address this issue, the current study adopted a quasi-experimental (comparison group, pretest-posttest) design. 96 English-major university students, divided into comparison and intervention groups, took part in the study. Next, the students’ awareness of importance markers, as discourse organizers, in authentic English academic lectures was raised. This involved nine one-hour sessions of explicit instruction on such expressions for the students in the comparison group. On the other hand, raising the intervention group students’ awareness of such expressions involved working with a concordancer as a DDL approach with the help of a teacher. Drawing on an English academic lecture comprehension test, a self-assessment survey, and a free-response survey, the findings of the study showed that following DDL to raise the learners’ awareness of discourse organizers through concordancing with the help of the teacher improves their comprehension of authentic English academic lectures significantly, but not from the learners’ perspective. The study has pedagogical implications for language teaching, learning, and materials development.