The present study explored the role of CONCORDANCING in learning lexical and grammatical collocations under two conditions, with and without output. It also set out to rank lexical and grammatical collocations in terms of the degree of the challenge they might impose on L2 learners. A total of 45 Iranian intermediate learners of English were randomly divided into an output, a non-output, and a control group. Learners received a six-session treatment in three different conditions; the output group was required to perform a story-writing task by searching for the collocations in CONCORDANCING. The non-output group only searched for collocations in CONCORDANCING without performing the tasks. The control group performed the tasks without having access to CONCORDANCING. The results of the pretest, as well as immediate and delayed posttests, analyzed by separate one-way ANOVAs indicated that the experimental groups outperformed the control group in learning collocations under the influence of CONCORDANCING. However, the achievement of the output group was superior to and more lasting than the non-output group. Findings also demonstrated that lexical collocations posed more challenge on all learners.

Collocations have the potential to differentiate native speakers from non-native ones clearly (Nation, 2001). Many studies have explored the effect of different teaching techniques on collocations in the context of CONCORDANCING. The present study investigated the influence of CONCORDANCING and scaffolding on Iranian intermediate English learners’ use of high CV and low CV collocations. Three experimental groups received a 10-session treatment during which the participants had access to CONCORDANCING under symmetrical, asymmetrical, and no-scaffolding conditions. The control group, however, received neither CONCORDANCING nor scaffolding. Two parallel sets of story writing and paraphrasing tasks were given in the immediate and delayed posttests to measure the influence of the treatments. Results indicated that the experimental groups outperformed the control group significantly in producing high CV and low CV collocations. However, no statistically significant difference was observed between high CV and low CV collocations as a result of CONCORDANCING and scaffolding.

The present study explored the effectiveness and efficacy of concordance-based instruction on learning and using proposition collocations (PCs) by Iranian EFL learners. Furthermore, we explored the instructional issues involved from both students and the teacher's perspectives. To this end, 60 homogeneous intermediate EFL learners participated in the study as the two thirty-subject groups of experimental and control. A researcher-made test on PCs was administered as the pretest to make sure that the learners’ knowledge of PCs was approximately equal. Two parallel versions of the pretest were administered, in turn, as the immediate and delayed posttests with the aim of evaluating the possible effect(s) of eight sixty-minute treatment sessions. The results of a repeated-measures ANOVA revealed a significant difference between the performance of the experimental group and control group from the immediate to the delayed posttests. Also, the effect for the interaction of time and group was significant. At the end of the study, a 20-item questionnaire was administered to elicit participants’ attitudes towards using CONCORDANCING to learn PCs. The results revealed that almost all respondents expressed positive attitudes towards learning PCs through CONCORDANCING, although some participants faced some practical or technical difficulties while using this technology. We also surveyed the teacher’ s attitude towards concordance-based PC instruction via an interview, proposing further issues and options for the classroom teaching practice. Lastly, the implications of the study for language teaching and applied linguistics are discussed.

In the introductory stages of language learning, students are exposed to comparative forms explicitly taught in their textbooks. As Knoch (2004) mentioned, this is accomplished by teaching the comparative form of the adjective generally directly followed by a than clause. This study aimed to compare differences between native and nonnative material developers with regard to the coverage of comparative forms. In doing so, two corpora of high school books and Interchanges were developed and juxtaposed. The data were gathered by scanning the books and converting them into computerized forms. The data were then analyzed by the frequency percentages of the forms and further examined and compared as well. The results revealed that there was a significant difference between the two corpora with regard to the coverage of comparative forms.

This paper reports a study that examined the effect of web-based and collaborative corrective feedback (CF) on the use of English articles in the written mode. Sixty four Iranian learners of English were placed in the web-based CF, the collaborative CF, and the control group. During two treatment sessions, all participants were required to narrate their accounts of reading 2 fables in a fixed time span. The targeted forms used incorrectly in the narration of the web-based CF group were specified and sent back to participants as a hyperlink to a concordance file designed for this study. Later, the group was required to exploit concordances for self-correction using an online concordance website. Participants in the collaborative CF group revised their narrations collaboratively. The control group, however, received no CF. Results of repeated measures ANOVAs run on the data obtained revealed that although both web-based and collaborative CF improved learners' L2 writing in terms of English articles significantly, web-based CF showed some superiority over collaborative CF. The findings also suggested, though implicitly, that participants assumed more responsibility and independence in revising their own writing as a result of the CFs given in this study.

The purpose of the present study is threefold. First, to see whether CONCORDANCING materials presented through data-driven learning (the DOL) approach have any effect on the teaching/learning collocation of prepositions or not. Second, to find out if knowledge of collocation of prepositions is differentiated among the different levels of EFL learners ‘proficiency. Third, to determine the extent to which EFL learners' knowledge of collocation of prepositions is affected by their LI. To this end, 200 English major students studying at three universities m Shahrekord (including Shahrekord University, Payame Noor University of Shahrekord and Islamic Azad University of Shahrekord) served as the participants of this study. At first, the Michigan Test of English Language Proficiency was given to determine the participants' levels of proficiency. Then they were randomly divided in two groups.A completion test on collocation of preposition was given as the pretest. In one group, the participants underwent a conventional-based treatment on prepositions and their collocational pat terns. In the second group, they were taught through the DDL approach that was based on CONCORDANCING. A posttest was which was the same as the pretest was used to det' ermine the effects of the treatments. Then the obtained data submitted to different statistical analyses including correlation, analysis of variance (one-way ANOVA) and post hoc comparison using the Scheffe test. The results of the study led to three conclusions about second language acquisition.First, the DDL approach showed to be highly effective in the teaching and learning collocation of prepositions. Second, learners' performance in collocation of prepositions showed to be positively correlated with their levels of proficiency.Third, the analysis of errors of collocations indicated that Iranian EFL learners tended to carry over their LI collocational patterns in to their L2 production.

In recent years, computer assisted language learning (CALL) methods have been taking advantage of different types of corpora and CONCORDANCING tools in solving lexical, grammatical, stylistic, semantic, and many other different linguistic problems.This paper isan effort to demonstrate the effect of using concordances in English language classes as a tool for self-learning of certain grammatical patterns, namely, verbs and adjectives with different prepositions. Grammatical and lexical studies are among the two most frequent areas which have made use of linguistic corpora. The results reveal the high effectiveness of corpus consultation as a supplement to conventional language learning tools such as grammar textbooks, dictionaries and the like. The results also made clear that the effect of corpus on students’ self-learning increases as their level of language proficiency enhances. The total improvement of the students on using corpora has been gained as 18.4% which is promising inits own status.

This study investigates the differential effects of the deductive and inductive cognitive approaches on the improvement of verb-adverb collocational knowledge in the context of classroom CONCORDANCING. Eighty-two participants were assigned to deductive, inductive, and control groups. During two intensive 90-minute sessions, the experimental groups were given some receptive and productive tasks to do using the concordancer as a reference tool. While the collocational patterns for accomplishing the tasks were explicitly presented to the deductive group, the inductive group was required to work out the underlying patterns. The analysis of the data gathered from receptive (multiple-choice) and productive (sentence-completion and sentence writing) collocation pretest and post-test revealed that concordance had significant effects on the improvement of L2 collocational knowledge. While both the deductive and inductive groups showed similar gains in receptive knowledge of collocations, the inductive approach was found to be more effective in developing productive knowledge. Overall, the students had positive views of concordance.

Today, linguistic corpora play a crucial role in solving different types of linguistic issues thanks to emerging computer technology. Bilingual parallel corpora aligned at sentence and word level can be retrieved for single-word as well as multi-word units making easier further applications in different computer and language areas. In this paper we address the problem of exploiting English-Persian parallel corpus in making an efficient bilingual concordance using mutual information measure. Here, a mutual information statistics is used to add word level alignments between English and Persian sentence pairs in our parallel corpus. A parallel corpus with alignments on the word level has certainly many applications among which phrase-based translation memory software, terminology management, cross-language information retrieval, statistical machine translation system and the like. We conducted an experiment using our algorithm and compared alignment outputs with manually aligned sentences. Experimental results revealed that our CONCORDANCING program gained the accuracy rate of 75% which seems very encouraging.

There is a consensus among language teachers and researchers about the critical role of vocabulary acquisition in language learning development (e. g., Webb & Nation, 2017; Schmitt, 2008(. However, vocabulary learning poses a challenge for most EFL learners (e. g., Schouten-van Parreren, 1980; McCarten, 2007; Teng, 2016). A large number of studies have explored the influence of different vocabulary instruction techniques on enhancing language learners' vocabulary development (Webb & Nation, 2017). More recently, concordance-based instruction has been introduced as a beneficial approach for teaching vocabulary (Boulton & Cobb, 2017; Kazaz, 2015; Soruc & Tekin, 2017). This approach engages learners in data-driven learning (DDL) which requires them to explore concordance examples and discover knowledge for themselves. DDL is in line with the inductive language learning and exploratory approach. In concordance-based vocabulary instruction, learners are exposed to language instances and are supposed to both notice the meaning of the target lexicon or recognize the patterns and understand them through analysis and generalizations which is in line with the noticing hypothesis. Also, according to Craik and Lockhart’ s (1972) theory of depth of processing, there is a hierarchy of processing levels and deeper processing of information is conducive to longer retention of words. In the present study, the learners were asked to infer the meaning of unfamiliar words which required them to analyze the contexts for contextual clues and also evaluate the accuracy and appropriateness of their inferences. Constructivist learning theory is another theory that provides support for this study. This theory is based on the idea that knowledge is not passively accumulated and learners themselves actively construct their knowledge. Stated differently, this theory posits that learning doesn’ t occur through transmitting a body of knowledge by instructors as it is supposed by traditional approaches (Boulton, 2017). In the present study, learners actively analyzed concordance lines, generated and tested hypotheses, and discovered knowledge for themselves. On the other hand, presenting words in context provides learners with an opportunity to infer the meaning of unknown words through using contextual clues (Van den Broek et al., 2018). It is believed that the meaning inference of unfamiliar words plays an important role in developing learners’ word knowledge (Hamada, 2009). To sum up, CONCORDANCING paves the way for lexical inferencing by presenting the words in multiple contexts which improves vocabulary learning (Nassaji, 2006). Since the focus of literature has mostly been on comparing concordance-based vocabulary teaching and learning with more traditional methods, ignoring the fact that concordance can take various formats (Balance, 2016), the present study addressed this issue by exploring the effect of three different concordance formats (two complete sentences, one complete sentence, and incomplete sentence) on learners’ vocabulary gain and retention. The participants of the study were 66 upper-intermediate English language learners who were selected from three classes based on their performance on Quick Oxford Placement Test. Each group received 63 new words in one of the concordance formats. The target words were presented in the three formats within 7 sessions and the participants of each group were asked to infer the meaning of the new words from one of the contexts. The effect of the three concordance formats on learners’ vocabulary gain and retention was explored by conducting 2 one-way ANOVAs. Moreover, post hoc multiple comparisons were run to locate any significant differences across the three groups. The results revealed that using concordance examples in all three formats was effective in learning new words. However, those who received two-sentence concordance examples outperformed the other groups in the immediate vocabulary test. The first group’ s better performance in the immediate test of vocabulary gain, can be attributed to their access to a larger context and hence more contextual clues that were noticed by them, their more involvement in the task, and more successful meaning construction from the context. Furthermore, no significant difference was found between the three groups with regard to vocabulary retention. However, the descriptive statistics revealed that the group who received incomplete sentences was less successful in vocabulary retention compared to the other groups. Therefore, using concordance examples in incomplete sentence formats is not recommended for presenting new words. Despite its advantages, the use of concordancer for language learning is not widespread (Romer, 2010). This is the case for the Iranian context where teachers and learners are mostly unaware of concordance availability or are unfamiliar with using this tool. Since language learners don’ t have access to online concordance inside the classroom, language teachers can prepare printed concordance examples in the two-sentence format to teach new words and gradually encourage learners to use online concordance outside the classroom. The findings provide insights into the use of concordance in vocabulary teaching and learning.