Corpus Consultation for Lexical Collocations in L2 Writing: A Study on Korean Learners of English

1. GLoCALL 2007 Direct Corpus Consultation in Producing Lexical Collocations in L2 Writing by Korean Learners of English Chang, Yiboon Seoul National University

2. Motivations Problem statement • Increasing importance of collocations and • corpus consultation in the field of • second language acquisition • 2.“Non-nativeness” caused by lack of collocational competence • 3. Lack of previous studies on lexical collocation use

3. 4 Outline Research Questions 1 Key Terms 2 Related Work 3 Methods 4 Results & Discussion 5 Summary & Future Work 6

4. Research Questions 1. How do Korean learners of English incorporate corpus consultation in producing lexical collocations in L2 writing? - Acceptability of collocations produced utilizing a concordance program 2. How do the learners think about corpus consultation in their L2 writing? - Advantages and disadvantages of corpus use - Difficulties of corpus consultation (Quality and context of corpora)

5. Definition of Key Terms • Corpus & Corpora - Large language data stored for certain purpose - Corpora • Direct corpus consultation - Exploiting corpus resources in language learning and studies - Concordancer • Lexical collocations - Collocations - Grammatical collocations - Lexical collocations

6. Definition of Key Terms • Six types of lexical collocations 1. Adjective + Noun ex.close tie,rough estimate 2. Verb + Noun ex. make a success, ease tension 3. Noun + Verb ex. bomb exploded, study shows 4. Noun + Noun ex. legend star, gap year 5. Adjective + Verb ex. heavily rain, strongly oppose 6. Adverb + Adjective ex. bitterly controversial, hopelessly addicted

7. Related work • Turbull & Burston (1998) - Direct corpus consultation of two non-native postgraduate students • Kennedy & Miceli (2001) - Investigating learners’ corpus use and its effectiveness • Gaskell & Cobb (2004) - Investigating the effectiveness of concordance feedback for writing errors • Yoon & Hirvela (2004) - ESL students attitudes towards corpus in L2 writing • Chambers & O’Sullivan (2004) - Corpus consultation and its effect on advanced learners’ writing skills • Koo (2006) - Effects of using corpora and online reference tools on foreign language writing * Sufficient search skill training and additional support are required to maximize the effect of corpus consultation on language learning.

8. Methods • Setting - Writing six essays (500 – 700 words) utilizing Collins WordbanksOnline web concordancer as well as any traditional reference materials • Participants - Two Korean females and six Korean males aged between 23 and 30 with different academic backgrounds • Procedures 1. Introductory lecture on lexical collocations and direct corpus consultation 2. Performing writing tasks utilizing a web concordancer 3. Data collection through an online community 4. Data analysis 5. Interviews using an online messenger program

9. Methods • Acceptability judgement (Nesselhaulf, 2005) A: Acceptable, (A): largely acceptable, Q: Questionable, (U): largely unacceptable, U: unacceptable

10. Results • Lexical collocations produced by Korean learners - Total 25,663 words collected from 48 essays - 2,263 lexical collocations produced (8.8% of total words) - 1,974 different types of collocations - 653 deviant collocations (33.1% of the collocations produced) * Deviant collocations: those judged “questionable” or “unacceptable” • Acceptability of lexical collocations produced

11. Results • Lexical collocations produced using a concordancer - Total 354 collocations produced - 121 deviant collocations (34.2% of total collocations) - The ratio of deviant collocation use for each type adj-noun(40.9%), verb-noun(30.7%), noun-verb(16.7%) noun-noun(26.5%), adv-verb(22.2%), adv-adj(33.3%) * No difference in the ratio of correct outcomes • The ratio of deviances in the acceptability judgement from the concordancer - 96 collocations were judged “questionable” or “unacceptable” by the concordancer among the total 121 deviances produced using a concordancer * Learners’ failure to search appropriate expressions on the concordance program (80% failure ratio)

12. Results • Advantages of direct corpus consultation - Useful for verification - Frequency data - Strong belief on the authenticity - Reliable quality of the data (cf. Google) ex. In addition, students can broaden their perspective on life while traveling by meeting and seeing *unacquainted people, places, and culture to learn the fact that the world they had known was not all, as well as having time to *reflect on themselves seriously. unacquainted people -> new people reflect seriously-> find themselves, or for self-examination)

13. Results • Disadvantages of direct corpus consultation - Difficult data analysis process - Time-consuming search procedure - Characteristics of source texts * Demand for user-friendly specialized corpora • Difficulties caused by contextual differences - No difficulty in inferring contextual meaning - Difficulty in applying the search results to learners’ own contexts. * Learners need to develop the ability to adapt the language input totheir own discourse.

14. Summary 1. How do Korean learners of English incorporate corpus consultation in producing lexical collocations in L2 writing? - One third of collocations produced appear deviant. - Four fifths of the deviances are caused by failure to search appropriate expressions in the program. * The limitation of general large corpora & Lack of L2 vocabulary and contextual knowledge

15. Summary 2. How do the learners think about corpus consultation in their L2 writing? - Positive attitudes towards data authenticity - Desire for user-friendly specialized corpora - Difficulty in using L2 data due to contextual differences * High expectation of the potential benefit of direct corpus consultation & Difficulties in using concordance programs for language learning

16. Implications for Teaching 1. Need to learn how to use words in the given context 2. Practice distinguishing synonyms and their usage 3. Compare possible and impossible combinations 4. Practice applying the existing collocations into diverse contexts Lack of Vocabulary & Contextual Knowledge Difficulties in searching appropriate expressions in Concordance programs and applying them into language production • Give up the myth about • one-to-one equivalence • between L1 and L2 • 2. Diverse activities using • concordance programs • 3. Advice from teachers & peers

17. Future Work • Studies on the effects of specialized corpora - Developing corpora for specific purposes to investigate their advantages and disadvantages • Statistic evidence on the effects of direct corpus consultation - Incongruent results in previous research - More empirical studies with statistically meaningful results - Exploring new and better methods of effectively incorporating corpora in language learning and teaching

18. GLoCALL 2007 TEL : +82-2-712-9143 Mobile : +82-11-9743-0621E-mail : lemon22@snu.ac.kr Thank you!