Learner Concordancing for EFL College Writing Accuracy

Abstract

As technologies advance, the use of corpora and concordance programs has shown their potential to help second language writing classes. Although some writing research has demonstrated usefulness of corpora in different ways, much less is known concerning how corpora can scaffold students’ correction and uptake of written corrective feedback for revision. The current study adopted a semester-long classroom-based research design keeping classroom ecology in order to examine how second-year EFL college students took up teacher-coded feedback by consulting corpus tools and other e-reference resources to rectify errors in their essays. Fourteen participants composed three multi-draft essay assignments plus a diagnostic essay in various genres. They used two Chinese–English concordance programs and “Corpus of Contemporary American English” to help their revisions. Questionnaires, interviews, students’ marked and revised essays, their written revision records, and video recording of learner–corpus interaction were analyzed and triangulated. Errors were found to decrease with increased frequency of corpus consultation over the semester. Although most participants appreciated the assistance of corpus tools, reservations were noted in the process. Two student cases with average writing performance point to learners’ engagement with corpora as one crucial factor interacting with perceptions and outcomes of lookups. Pedagogical implications and limitations are discussed.