Channarong Rachbuanoy. Using Concordances to Revise Vocabulary Use in Written Assignments. Master's Degree(Applied Linguistics for English Language Teaching). King Mongkut's University of Technology Thonburi. KMUTT Library. : King Mongkut's University of Technology Thonburi, 2007.
Using Concordances to Revise Vocabulary Use in Written Assignments
Abstract:
In writing assignments, the learners usually have problems concerning vocabulary use in
the aspect of collocations. Nowadays, technology is implemented in language teaching
and learning, and a concordancing program is used as a corpus tool to help the learners
to check and correct their written work. This study aims to investigate whether M.A.
students in Applied Linguistics (English Language Teaching Program) can use
concordances to identify and revise vocabulary in their written assignments.
The research instruments in this study are students' writing (original and revised target
words), concordances (learner concordances (LC) and benchmark concordance (BC))
and stimulated recall interviews. The subjects in this study were 4 first year graduate
students of an M.A. Program in English Language Teaching at the School of Liberal
Arts, King Mongkut's University of Technology Thonburi (KMUTT). They have to
write the assignments and use the concordancing program (SCP) to compare learner
concordance and benchmark concordance. They have to identify whether their target
words were used correctly or not according to the benchmark concordance. If they think
their target words were used wrongly, they revised them. If not, then they did not correct
them. Then, they were interviewed right after they finished checking.
The findings of this study reveal that the subjects could not use concordances to revise
vocabulary errors. The ability in using concordances of each subject was different. It
depends on the subject. The effects of using concordances on correction are divided
into 3 types: no effect, positive effect (Concordances help learners correct vocabulary
errors) and negative effect (Learners revised the correct words into incorrect words). As
regards how students used concordances, it usually begins with reading LC and BC.
Then, identify parts of speech, and the rule. The second step is inducing the rules. The
last step is applying the rule or substituting the target word by using prior knowledge.
The findings indicate that active and paSSIve vOIce forms affect the reVlSlon of
vocabulary errors. In addition, noticing multi-word units is a key role in using
concordances successfully since some target words are not a single word. Thus, to
effectively revise vocabulary errors, teachers need to raise awareness of these two
issues. The findings can be also applied to support the learners to be autonomous
learners in self- correction. The learners can learn through the authentic text concerning
English for Specific Purposes (ESP) or English for Academic Purposes (EAP).
Moreover, it can be seen that in using concordances, apart from the learners having to
consider grammatical rules or meaning of the target word, collocation is another issue
that the learners should take into consideration.
For English language teaching, the teachers can create the benchmark corpus to use for
ESP or EAP. Teachers can apply the process in using concordance to effectively revise
vocabulary errors in this study to train their learners. In training, teachers need to
consider English proficiency of each learner since their abilities in using concordances
are different. Thus, the techniques and instruction aids need to suit each learner as well.