Learner perceptions of a concordancing tool for academic writing

Abstract

Online templates have the potential to scaffold complex writing processes and to provide information and language prompts for writers. The purpose of this study is threefold. First, for assisting students in their scholarly writing, an online Scholarly Writing Template (SWT) was designed and developed. SWT includes two major features: (1) an information template that guides students in their development of content, and (2) a language template that provides students with language support by using a discipline-specific corpus and concordancer as a source of language examples. The second purpose of this study rests on efforts to examine the effects that the learner variables had on participants' perception of the SWT. To this end, the author implemented the SWT into an academic-writing course and surveyed 20 participants regarding their perceptions of the SWT. Third, individual retrospective interviews were conducted to understand the learning processes, the strategies in use, and the perceptions of students in relation to the students' different proficiency and publication experiences. The results of the study show that students held a positive attitude towards the scholarly writing template and that the template had varying effects on students' scholarly writing processes and on students' use of strategy. Implications and recommendations for future research and system design are addressed.