Concordance feedback

A reflection on “Can learners use concordance feedback for writing errors?” Gaskell, D,. & Cobb, T. (2004).
This was a paper to establish whether concordance was an effective way of assisting students with their writing abilities. The study involved 20 adult Chinese EFL students, 11 male and 9 female. All were computer literate and most were graduates. The students were required to complete 10 assignments over a 15 week semester. Peer feedback was used and the instructor then gave feedback with a concordance link for the five typical errors.

The students provided a short essay, these were analyzed and the most common errors were given concordance feedback throughout the course.

In order to not overwhelm the students only five concordanced errors were targeted. These identified errors were then searched for in the correct form. Online concordance software was used to show the correct way of using the examples.

After a four week training period the students were shown how to conduct concordance searches themselves.

At the end of the course the students were asked if they felt their English writing skills had improved. All of the students felt that their English improved however only 40% felt that this was due to the concordance work.

It would seem that a longer training period and a much longer study period would have had more favourable results. It did seem that after week four some of the interest waned. It seemed from this study that this was not going to work well with more basic students.

I usually teach very young learners and as such I fail to see how concordance software could work with the younger students. This article was written six years ago and software improvements may have been made since then.