Revisiting the Effect of Concordancing on Lexico-Grammatical Patterns of Signalling Nouns in EFL Writing

Department of English, the Chinese University of Hong Kong Abstract Based on Thurstun and Candlin (1998), the current research re-examines whether, and the extent to which, concordance learning materials can make an impact on learners' argumentative writing in a Chinese EFL context. A topic-specific corpus was established at the outset to develop KWIC (Key Word in Context) concordance learning materials. As a controlled experimental study, forty third-year Chinese EFL undergraduates were enlisted and randomly assigned to a control group and an experimental group. Lexical input as an independent variable was tested with students in both groups by means of requiring them to produce argumentative essays using a prescribed list of signalling nouns. At the pre-writing stage, the experimental group was given the target words supplied with corpus concordances while the control group was supplied with words only for brainstorming. The written texts of the pretest, immediate posttest and delayed posttest were investigated and compared within and between groups. Although no statistically significant difference in the overall writing quality was found between the two groups, the experimental group made greater improvements than the control group in terms of mean scores in the posttest. It was also found that written output by the experimental group, as compared with the control group, contained fewer errors in terms of the target words used. Based on the findings of this experiment, it can, to a large extent, be safely concluded that corpus-informed concordance exercises are quite effective in improving EFL learners' lexico-grammatical patterns before a writing task.

並列關鍵字

corpus-informed ； concordance ； lexico-grammatical patterns ； signaling nouns ； EFL writing

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