ESL students' use of concordance in the transfer of academic word knowledge: An exploratory study

Abstract

Concordancing in the classroom is fairly a new approach that has emerged with the use of corpora in language learning. In a concordance, language is presented in an authentic context; learners are able to examine a key word in the context of a string of sentences which can exemplify the use of that particular word. This exploratory study examined whether the use of an online concordance program together with an online dictionary by 18 intermediate ESL undergraduates aided in the transfer of word knowledge to an academic writing task. The results indicate that there was statistically significant transfer of vocabulary knowledge to the writing task.