The Effects of Corpus-Based Language Instruction on Productive Vocabulary Knowledge

Abstract

While the issues of receptive and productive vocabulary knowledge have been discussed in many vocabulary studies, language learners and practitioners have also tried to reduce the discrepancy between the two types of vocabulary knowledge. At the same time, with the development of new technology of the Internet, web based concordancers became easily accessible for the language learners. However, there has been little research on investigating the effect of the concordancer with empirical data. The current research, therefore, explores the effects of the concordanccer, an application of the corpus-based language instruction, on ESL learners’ productive vocabulary knowledge. Korean undergraduate students at an American public university were recruited, randomly assigned to an experimental group (concordancer group, n=10) or a control group (thesaurus group, n=11) for a series of writing practice, and their vocabulary errors in writing samples were statistically compared. The results indicate that the concordancer is an effective vocabulary reference and learning tool, and it is more effective in improving grammar knowledge of vocabulary than the lexical knowledge. The discussion includes suggestions for the future research of corpus-based language learning in assessing ESL productive vocabulary knowledge.