Literature Review

1. Literature Review

2. Terminology • Authentic Materials • Texts (written or spoken) designed for native speakers (Harmer 1991) • Text not specifically produced for language learning (Nunan 1989) • Concordance Program/ Concordancer • Used to find examples of “authentic usage” • Operates on a corpus • Arranges words (maintaining context info) • Alphabetically • By frequency

3. Areas of Focus • Assessment of language learning strategies • Curriculum design – is curriculum structured well? • Curriculum content – did student learn? • Overcoming difficulties using authentic materials • Assessment of concordancers • Student preparedness • language fluency • Corpus investigation skills

4. Assessment of language learning strategies • Curriculum content goals • O’Dowd (2003) • Email exchange result in “intercultural learning” • Qualitative one-year study • Discussed both successes and failures • Curriculum design • Ghardirian et al. (2002) • Encounter of words >= 5 times • Text contains 95% of known word tokens

5. Overcoming difficulties using authentic materials • Assessment of concordancers (tool and usage skill) • Corpus investigation skills • Mollering (2001) • German language learning • Concluded that concordancer is useful tool • German modal particles • Resulted in development of worksheets • Kennedy & Miceli (2001) • Italian corpus in a language learning program • Students frustrated due to lack of own investigation skills • Resulted in curriculum revisions • Curado (2001) • English for Special Purposes (ESP) • Concordancer useful for college-level learning • St. John (2001) • Pilot German-English study of concordancer usage. • Corcordancer supplemented teaching materials • Students able to independently perform corpus investigations

6. Overcoming difficulties using authentic materials • Assessment of concordancers (tool and usage skill) • Language fluency • Wang (2001) • Chinese-English study on eight subjects • Students developed in-depth lexical knowledge