英文摘要 |
Recently, more corpus tools with monolingual or multilingual data have been developed as digital learning and natural language processing technologies advance. Pedagogy which harnesses the power of concordance programs, or data-driven learning (DDL), promises to encourage collocation learning. Recent vocabulary researchers emphasize that English learners need not only more words but also more phrasal knowledge such as collocations (words combined due to habitual use) to upgrade their proficiency. The current study investigated the application of integrating a Chinese- English concordance program, TANGO, with lookups of adjective-noun and verb-noun collocations into English writing instruction and examined its impact of such invention on college students in Taiwan. The target collocations were chosen from previous studies on L1-Chinese learners’ misuse and relevant literature on collocation lists. With the singlegroup pre-/posttest design, the participants were given a collocation test and a paragraph writing task before the concordancing-enhanced instruction was given to increase their awareness and consolidate productive knowledge of including the target collocations in their writing. Such DDL was found to improve L2 students’ writing performance and test scores through guidance of authentic usage in concordance. The positive effects were maintained two weeks after the treatment. While similar benefits that prior research has found on using DDL for L2 writing may explain our results, we found interlingual and intralingual factors as well as learners’ prior collocation performance to exert varying influence on learners’ distinct collocation performance. Based on their pretest performance, the low scorers made more progress. Verb-noun combinations and non-L1 influenced collocations showed more improvement in the posttest, unlike findings in prior research. Limitations, implications, and future research are discussed. We argue that the study contributes useful findings to our existing knowledge to researchers and teachers by confirming the effectiveness of integrating concordancers for learning English collocations and using them in writing. We also suggest that future research examine differential effects of collocation types (the role of Chinese-English difference and the intralingual factor of the English collocation system itself) on learner improvement. |