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CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background and Motivation
Taiwan is a test-oriented society, where many EFL learners are taught to learn English vocabulary through drilling and memorization because this is thought to be the best way to improve learners’ vocabulary. Although this method seems to be an effective way to cope with tests in school, students who undergo the school entrance exam system in Taiwan might become confused and have problems in using precise vocabulary when dealing with new contexts.
Nevertheless, when students encounter a new vocabulary, teachers, before they think of the best way to explain or explore vocabulary, tend to use the traditional ‘drills and repetition’, methods to make students memorize vocabulary. Due to the fact that the majority of junior or senior high school teachers are under the pressure of limited time and needing to maintain students’ academic performance, few teachers try to find a new way in helping students understand the usage. This is the situation in Taiwan, a
test-oriented, EFL context, in which rote-learning is the most common method of learning vocabulary.
When the students enter colleges, the teaching context will be changed with a more flexible surrounding. Students have no test pressure as previous learning stages. The teacher in college might have flexibility to arrange his or her own curriculum and to teach students in different ways. This study focuses on college students because they have no test pressure and more time to explore the usage of each word. For college teachers,
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although the class still has limitation to some extent, teachers can still manage to do a lot of creative activities in class.
In addition to the need of vocabulary development, the strategy of how to deal with bimodal distribution phenomenon of students’ English proficiency level in Taiwan EFL context has become an important issue for teachers.The performance gap in English proficiency has troubled a lot of English teachers to meet the needs of all students. The effectiveness of vocabulary acquisition lies much on learners’ ability to produce or recognize a word in different contexts, which requires the retrieval of the vocabulary knowledge in long-term memory (Craik & Lockart, 1972). Hence, when teachers want to design teaching materials, they need to first understand the learning distinctions between high and low achievers. Teachers will be able to respond to both groups’ needs towards learning vocabulary.
With the rapid development of large corpora and the availability of powerful personal computers, many researchers and teachers in ELT have begun to explore the potentials of corpus linguistics in language teaching and language learning. One of the ways to learn vocabulary is using a concordancer to learn vocabulary. Concordancer is not only a sophisticated computer retrieval program with a large amount of information in the form of computer language corpora facilitating data-based inductive learning (Chan & Liou, 2005), but also a bundle of examples of a specific word or phrase that can be displayed efficiently. Thus, the amalgamation of corpora and concordances provide a new framework in the language learning and teaching by allowing learners to discover patterns through extensive naturally occurring examples in real texts (Hill, 2000). Several scholars have conducted the use of concordancing for second or foreign language acquisition, such as collocation learning (Lin, 2002;
Tseng, 2002; Chan & Liou, 2005), lexical acquisition (Cobb, 1999; Sun & Wang,
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2003; Supatronant, 2005; Yeh, Liou & Li, 2007; Boulton, 2009), and grammar acquisition (Hsieh, 2008; Ewa, 2011; Wang, 2012).
Data-driven learning (DDL) exploits the computer corpus for teaching and is developed by Tim Johns (1991), a pioneering teacher who combined corpus with language teaching (Leech, 1994; Hunston, 2002). The essence of DDL, a
research-then-theory method, is that students acquire grammar rules and regular patterns inductively through exploring corpus materials. In the DDL approach, based on the theory that students can act as ‘language detectives (Johns, 1997:101),’ learners are not regarded simply as recipients of knowledge, but as researchers studying the regularity of the language. Teachers present learners with authentic examples and ask them to interpret clues and draw conclusions from context and this encourages learners to ‘search for information without knowing in advance what patterns they will discover (Huston, 2002:184)’.
With the large interest in data-driven learning (DDL), a growing number of studies have suggested that data-driven learning may indeed facilitate processes beneficially to second language learning, especially to develop learners’ writing and vocabulary ability (Gaskell& Cobb, 2004; Scott& Tribble, 2006; Boulton, 2009) to name but a few. More Specifically, both low and high proficiency level students increased their writing ability (Yoon& Hirvela, 2004; Tian, 2005; Boulton, 2009) and correct usage of grammar increased (Ciezielska-Ciupek, 2001; Tian, 2005). Students also view data-driven learning as a conducive method, which can result in their progressively accurate usage of vocabulary and grammar (Nesselhauf, 2003; Chen, 2004; Koosha & Jafarpour, 2006). Wu (2010) has discussed the effect of integrating corpus data into grammar instruction by using three near-synonyms ‘advise’,
‘recommend’, and ‘suggest’ as examples. Near-synonyms, which can be defined as
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lexical pairs that have very similar cognitive and denotational meanings, but which may differ in collocational or prosodic behavior, such as ‘strong’ and
‘power ’(Halliday, 1976). However, the issue of teaching near-synonyms has been totally ignored in previous literature. In order to help fill this gap, this study
establishes a niche to investigate the possible existence of using DDL approach to teach learners’ near-synonym and also investigate their collocational competence. The goal of the study is to find out whether the learner knows the correct usage of
near-synonyms and their phrases expressions through the DDL approach.