Using a Bilingual Concordancer for Text Revisions in EFL Writing

Autor: Yu Fen Yang, Ruey Fen Harn, Gwo Haur Hwang
Jazyk: angličtina
Rok vydání: 2019
Předmět:
Zdroj: Educational Technology & Society, Vol 22, Iss 1, Pp 106-119 (2019)
Druh dokumentu: article
ISSN: 1176-3647
1436-4522
Popis: Many students who study English as a foreign language (EFL) have difficulty transferring linguistic features between languages while writing. This study aims to investigate how college students improve their EFL writing with text revisions by using a bilingual concordancer (Chinese and English). A sample of 32 college students consented to participate in a writing program. According to pre-test scores, they were grouped into an experimental (N = 15) group, which used the bilingual concordancer, and a control (N = 17) group, which used Yahoo’s Chinese-English online dictionary. The results of the study indicate that the experimental group made greater improvement in text revision than those in the control group, as they raised metalinguistic awareness to evaluate word choice and sentence construction, by viewing authentic language examples retrieved from the bilingual concordancer. The bilingual concordancer also provided the experimental group with rich linguistic contexts to compare the differences between two languages and induce the rules of the target language (English), which lead to a reduction in errors due to the interference of the native language in EFL writing. In contrast, the control group relied mostly on limited sample sentences listed in the online dictionary, and lacking contexts resulted in little writing improvement.
Databáze: Directory of Open Access Journals