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very positive. Learners thought that doing vocabulary exercises through paper-printed concordance is more interesting than doing identical exercises of traditional teaching from textbooks. Every learner would like to do other similar corpus activities in later classes and was satisfied with the experience of learning English vocabulary in a corpus-based learning environment. More students had a sense of achievement in the corpus-based data-driven learning class and more were satisfied with this method.
Since the pilot study showed that the learners have significantly improved on near-synonyms, the main study will try to enlarge the population and increase teaching hours to investigate whether the learners improve their word knowledge or not.
The present study intends to investigate whether learners’ near-synonymous
achievement is enhanced through corpus-based data-driven learning (DDL) instruction. In this chapter, detailed information about methodology is presented in the following order.
It will begin with the introduction of the research design, followed by the participants and setting selected in this research. Later, specific procedure and materials will be outlined.
Finally, the instruments will be described, both quantitative and qualitative methods will be applied.
3.1 Research Design
This is a quasi-experimental study with a pre-, and post- test control group design, accompanied with qualitative method of semi-structure interviews and questionnaire with the experimental group of EFL university students in Taiwan. The independent variable is the different teaching delivery modes (corpus-based data-driven learning vs.
dictionary-based traditional vocabulary instruction) and the dependent variable is learners’
vocabulary knowledge achievement. Control variables include learner’s age, instruction hours, designed activities and previous learners’ English proficiency. There are two
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groups in this study: one experimental group and one control group. The experimental group received corpus-based data-driven learning while the control group received dictionary-based instruction in a traditional classroom. Posttests of near-synonyms were conducted in the 10th week. The detailed of the research structure is shown in Figure 3.1.
Figure 3.1 Research Structure
The variables involved in the study are explained as follows:
Control variables
In order to control the reliability of the study, several significant factors were strictly controlled in the experimental teaching procedures.
Since the classes were selected randomly by the researcher, students’ English proficiency might be different from one another. The experimental group and control group had similar English proficiency test which was based on their General English
Control variables:
Previous English Proficiency:
high achievers and low achievers (Initial English proficiency) English learning duration (Instructor and Instructor time)
Independent variable:
1. Corpus-based data-driven learning instruction
2. Traditional instruction
Dependent variables:
Learners’ near-synonymous vocabulary knowledge Learners’ perceptions
Preferred corpus-based data-driven learning activities
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Proficiency Test (GEPT) intermediate level in the last semester of academic year 2013.
The GEPT intermediate level test was used as a standard to group the participants in this study. Later, the researcher chose the highest and the lowest thirty percent of learners separately as the high and low achievers in the experimental and control group.
English learning duration
Duration means the time span the instructor gives lecture to learners. The
instruction duration in both the experimental and the control group were the same. The instruction was given in each class for 50 minutes once a week, and it was given on 10 consecutive weeks. And the total instructional time is five hundred minutes.
Instructor
The instructor, who taught according to school schedule on Monday afternoon, was the same as researcher in this study. He remained the same attitude in order to avoid the so-called ‘teacher’s factor’ interference, having no bias toward any particular students in the ongoing research. In the study, the researcher plays the role as a curriculum designer, activity facilitator, as well as an English instructor of near-synonymous vocabulary teaching.
Teaching materials
All students were taught near-synonyms in each class. The students in the
experimental group received data-driven learning instruction based on the teacher-made concordance lines selected from the BNC web corpus. There were forty pairs of
near-synonyms in the teaching materials. The control group was taught with the dictionary-based words’ definitions which were extracted from the five on-line dictionaries (Merriam Webster, Longman dictionary of contemporary English, Oxford
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dictionary, Cambridge dictionary, Collins English dictionary). Since both of on-line dictionaries were based on the word frequency, the teacher used these two dictionaries as the material to teach the control group.
Independent variable
This study adapted only one independent variable which was the teaching methodology related to data-driven learning approach. Students followed the same activity procedures in ten weeks.
Dependent variables
The dependent variables were referred to the students’ performances which were affected by the instruction and their reactions toward the data-driven learning approach.
3.2 Research Procedure and Duration
The procedure of the study is shown in Figure 3.2 which was conducted through three phases, the preparation phase, the experimental instruction phase, and complete phase. In the preparation phase, data-driven learning (DDL) was determined to be implemented in the college freshmen English class to facilitate near-synonymous vocabulary learning. Simultaneously, the research questions were generated to help explore the effectiveness of DDL approach. Later, the researcher started to design activity and questionnaires as well as the format of pretest and posttest. After designing the whole research tool, a pilot study was conducted in National Chengchi University English major freshmen (Reading and Writing Class I ) to determine if the research design was viable or not. After gathering the data from the pilot study, the research analyzed the results and revised the research tools to make sure the quasi-experiment can be conducted in a more