Yoon,
H., & Jo, J. W. (2014). Direct and indirect access to corpora: An
exploratory case study comparing students’ error correction and learning
strategy use in L2 writing. Language Learning & Technology, 18,
96-117.
Findings
- Learners’ overall improvement of grammatical and lexical knowledge
- In-/direct access to corpora increased grammatical and lexical knowledge.
Evidence
from pre-writing and post-writing evaluations on same writing topic.
Rate
of grammatical errors decreased: 9.9% in pre-writing to 6.3% in post-.
Lexical
errors from 3.7% to 2.0%.
Learners
corrected error present in the pre-writing such as use of articles and verb
form/mood.
Mistakes
were still observed in post-writing but grammatical and lexical knowledge have
increased.
Authors
argue that more errors can mean more improvement along the way because of the
immediate feedback from the corpus.
Considerations:
East Asian pedagogy, which has a strong rote learning methodologies and
Confucian philosophical ethic (where the instructor is the master of the
teaching material).
- Learners’ error correction pattern in indirect and direct corpus use
- Rate of self-correction was higher in the indirect use than in the direct use.
Learners
corrected 87% of grammatical errors; 66% of lexical errors by using concordance
data on their own.
Learners,
when they cannot correct other errors, asked for teacher’s intervention.
The
teacher helped learners to correct most of the errors successfully.
While
there are suggestions, a pattern of deliberate rejection and continued their
lexical errors.
Self-correction
rate lower in the direct corpus use. Simple interventions of the teacher helped
correct all their errors.
(1) *butter,
sugar and white powder; (third composition, indirect corpus)
(2) *nonhuman
lifestyle in Korea; (seventh composition, direct corpus)
In
(1) the student, though she did not know the word ‘flour’, the given examples
point her to use ‘flour’ and used it.
In
(2) the student looked up ‘human’ and realized he wanted to say ‘humane’. He
then started all over again and found the correct negative meaning inflection.
Though
(2) took a longer time, they “seemed to naturally acquire new language
information”.
Scanning
skills is observed in a Young, the highest level student, who did not require
teacher’s help. It begs exploration to establish if direct corpus use appeals
to learners who are patient, analytic, and fast enough to read and scan data.
Two
students, who are lower level, seemed to benefit more from teacher-edited
corpus materials. Further exploration is demanded.
i.
An observation, proficient students easily
changed preconceived errant knowledge when pursuing direct corpus access.
ii.
Lower-level student seemed to benefit more
from teacher-edited corpus materials when having conflicting knowledge.
Higher
level students tend to defer to their prior knowledge even though it contrasts with
the concordance examples. This is shown to be in contrast with low-level
students.
High
level students exhibited resistance to corrections for lexical errors in the
indirect corpus.
Joon,
resisted teacher’s explanation with his use of novel expression *not-well
planned building arrangements.
- Learning strategies in indirect and direct corpus use.
- “Learners adopted learning strategies appropriate for the particular task in the new learning situation. This is a very personal experience to the learner…” (p. 108).
i.
In both settings: most frequent is
cognitive strategy; followed by social strategy.
ii.
In indirect use: metacognitive strategy
(4.9 to 2.5 percent)
Participants
coordinate their own learning process toward cognitive.
- Subcategories of cognitive strategy
i.
Resourcing: Making use of materials
1. The
“trying-again-if-you-fail strategy”
2. In
indirect use of 15 examples, learners moved to another strategy to solve the
problem.
3. In
direct use, they type another word to solve problems.
4. Suggestion
in direct use: training students in using the concordance operations.
ii.
Application of prior knowledge
1. If
resourcing fails, there is an observable shift to acquired knowledge and
logical reasoning.
2. First,
after learners produced an apt prior knowledge they move to evaluation
strategies (metacognitive)
3. Second,
when learners have incorrect prior knowledge, teacher intervention is
requested.
4. Third,
having no relevant knowledge to the issue at hand, teacher intervention was
necessary particularly in direct use.
iii.
Translation strategy
1. In
indirect use, 10.0 percent; direct 9.4.
2. Overall,
learners skim data which they can easily understand regardless of produced
data.
3. In
indirect use, interest in translation is lost because sentences are cut off.
Advocating
naturalistic learning environment, indirect corpus must be produced in full
sentences.
The
data in direct corpus use shows that “a foreign speaker would not confront
every from of language use in a native setting” (p. 110).
iv.
Questions for clarification
1. In
indirect use, learners use various cognitive strategies to correct errors.
After a failed analysis, they ask for teacher’s explanation.
2. In
direct use, learners ask the teacher a lot to help them simplify the data, or
point our relevant examples.
3. For
two students, question for clarification is “a way to trim their anxiety and
elevate their confidence” (p. 111).
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