Concordance Programs in the EFL Classroom

Concordance Programs in the EFL Classroom
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Concordance Programs in the EFL Classroom
Context and EFL Learners’ Needs
This essay will discuss the use of concordance programs in the EFL classroom and the considerable differences between what textbooks teach and how native speakers apply language, as evidenced in the corpora. These two issues will form the discourse concerning EFL learners between the ages of 13 and 14 years old in a Chinese international school employing English as the language of instruction. The nature of instruction will be personal while the medium of instruction is face-to-face. On the other hand, the number of hours spent on working on concordance is two hours. All of the learners are relatively unfamiliar with corpus linguistics and the first half hour will be spent helping them familiarize with corpus linguistics. The students’ grammar, reading, writing, and vocabulary skills are slightly below those of their UK peers in year 8 of the UK national curriculum. Their speaking and listening skills are also at a lower level and, therefore, this essay will strive to consider these deficiencies, particularly by focusing on deepening reading comprehension, eliciting grammar rules, and expanding vocabulary competence to ensure that learners attain the proficiency levels needed to succeed in a British educational environment.
Developments in corpus linguistics over the past years, spurred by the progress and popularization of technology, have significantly affected language comprehension and operations thereby providing tools for language studies and language learners. Corpus use is an emerging promising field in second language acquisition, particularly as a reference tool in EFL instruction focusing on grammar and vocabulary (Kezhen, 2015, p. 61). The concordance can avail opportunities for EFL instructors to meet distinct language teaching goals and EFL learners to test their notions about language application. However, certain issues impede the application and potential of concordance in language learning including resistance from teachers, limited training among instructors, enduring controversies surrounding the use of invented or authentic data in the EFL teaching context, and learner problems in understanding authentic language as well as navigating concordance interfaces, among other practical issues. This essay will conduct a literature review of concordance programs in the EFL classroom as well as the teaching resources required in implementing a concordance program. It will also propose a suitable lesson exercise and then provide a rationale for the same.
Literature Review on Concordance as a Teaching Tool
Concordance refers to the process of accessing a corpus of text to analyze the usage of a particular word or phrase in the text as relates to context. This practice of examining the links between words and their correct application in texts is critical to understanding the application context of a word. The emergence of the computerized corpus as a useful tool in linguistic research is one of the many examples of how language studies integrate technology. As a result of the rapid developments in computer technology, it is now possible for language experts to store, examine, and analyze voluminous language data using the concordance component of the corpus (Bonelli, 2010, p. 18). Language teachers have hailed corpus linguistics as a very resourceful and efficient way of applying and teaching the English language closer to the patterns of a native speaker. The relation between corpus linguistics and EFL instruction has grown over the past two decades as a consequence of the former’s potential to present solely authentic and actual samples of language use.
Current literature on concordance programs in the EFL context indicates that the advantages of using concordance relates to the categories of authenticity, transparency, and learner autonomy. A concordance helps EFL instructors and materials designers to better describe what students should learn. Since corpora can comprise materials produced by students, it is easier for instructors to identify learners’ weaknesses. At the same time, EFL learners can use the corpora to not only learn about themselves but also take ownership of the learning process (Yavuz, 2014, p. 2313). Corpus linguistics offers a more unbiased view of language than that provided by anecdotes and intuition by providing effective analytical tools, through which an investigator can learn the application extent of language use patterns as well as the relative factors that influence variability. Most EFL students rely on learning from actual contexts instead of intuition or inference but concordance cultivates long-lasting language proficiencies. By providing various illustrations in the context of the same word, concordances allow EFL students to decipher the meaning and patterns of words.
On the whole, existing literature reveals that concordance programs bridge the gap between a student’s current language proficiency by providing hands-on experience and a data-driven learning approach. Learners can learn language meaning and patterns by themselves by using the concordance program to carry out inductive investigations of grammatical constructions and word usage. Students can recognize word patterns in the target language to come up with suitable and transferable simplifications in language use. Besides serving as a language-learning activity, concordance programs can perform the function of a powerful hypothesis testing device: having access to a corpus of authentic language allows learners to check or disprove their thoughts on English language application (Yılmaz & Soruç, 2015, p. 2627-2628). English-learning students can construct hypotheses for vocabulary terms and phrases and either confirm or disconfirm their hypotheses using concordance lines. This increased independence to conduct a critical reflection on fundamental linguistic forms is central to the acquisition of lexico-grammatical competency among EFL students.
On the other hand, concordance programs improve the ability of instructors to tailor lesson material to learners’ needs. For instance, a concordancer allows the instructor to verify that the words they are teaching are the most correct, frequent, and current. It is also possible for teachers to identify authentic illustrations to demonstrate and underpin the language they are instructing. When teachers create worksheets founded on authentic materials, they are sure to facilitate a pedagogical approach that reflects actual written and communicative language use. Material designers and curriculum developers can also profit from concordance programs that serve as extensive and excellent resources for authentic language application. More importantly, pedagogical research forms the basis of the concordance program approach to second language learning. EFL learners acquire second language competency through implicit and explicit learning. Implicit learning involves immersing oneself in an extensive range of language resources to facilitate cognitive semantic mapping of emerging linguistic structures. Concordance programs provide learners with access to extensive language resources thereby facilitating conscious processing of language structure, forms, and usage. Moreover, concordance programs facilitate explicit instruction and categorization while attending to individual learner cognitive frames and insights.
Invented Versus Authentic Data
However, one issue that has generated a lot of controversy in concordance programs in the EFL classroom is the issue of invented versus authentic data in the EFL teaching context. This controversy stems from the evolving and vague definition of native English speakers as well as the relative interconnection between intercultural communication and concordance. Another source of controversy is the broad range of meanings linked to authenticity: authenticity has numerous connotations and current literature provides several possible meanings. For instance, authenticity could refer to the language created by native speakers for native speakers; language created by a real speaker or writer and carrying a real message for a real audience; a quality bestowed on a text by the recipient and not something inherent in the text itself; the interaction between instructors and learners; the social circumstance of the learning environment; and the capacity to think or behave like a native speaker; among several other meanings (Gilmore, 2007, p. 3-4). Authentic data refers to the language employed by native speakers.
However, in the context of EFL teaching, authentic data denotes native speakers’ data as well as learner corpora. Conversely, invented data denotes non-native speakers’ data intended for non-native speakers to meet pre-determined curricular objectives. The debate surrounding the use of authentic versus invented data in EFL teaching extent has tended to center around the question of which data is more ideal for language learning (Course Text, n.d.). Proponents of teaching English using authentic data argue that despite the increasing communications between non-native English speakers and English assuming global language status, non-native speakers tend to overuse or underuse certain words thereby marring the correct and appropriate usage of the language. For this reason, a majority of students prefer learning English prefer using authentic data over invented data because they assume that native speakers have a broader collection of vocabulary terms, richer lexical resources, and extensive cultural background than non-native speakers (Torregrosa Benavent et al., 2011, p. 91-92).
Curriculum designers and Asian educators in international schools prefer native speakers as instructors because of the inherent belief that they are better placed to teach not only correct language use but also help learners acquire inductive capacity and metacognitive strategies. Moreover, a majority of foreign language teachers prefer using authentic data to invented data because they tend to cover most features of the language as compared to invented texts that overuse certain grammatical constructions, vocabulary terms, and word combinations, while nearly excluding the usage of others that are just as important. Prevailing linguistic theories such as the Audiolingual Method and the New Method have tended to give more importance to instructions materials than instructors themselves (Gilmore, 2007, p. 6). Although it is now understood that the role of teachers and students in the learning process is just as important as the texts employed, the debate surrounding the authenticity of texts has continued to rage on. For instance, the Communicative Language Teaching approach in EFL instruction stresses the use of authentic texts for instruction, underlining the importance of the linguistic ideas authentic data communicates even more than the philological forms they illustrate.
Invented data lacks naturalness and fails to cultivate that habitual environment in which students learn most effectively. Various language specialists have characterized invented data in textbooks as poor illustrations of the real thing in that they fail to embody the real and normal kind of English used by native speakers. Because of the inability of invented texts to provide real linguistic experiences, proponents of authentic data have argued that invented data fails to achieve the goal of helping EFL learners acquire the confidence and fluency they desire. Despite efforts to improve the naturalness of invented texts, there are still many gaps in terms of providing real linguistic experience, and much remains to be done to redress the imbalances in the usage of grammatical constructions, vocabulary terms, and word combinations (Gilmore, 2007, p. 6-7). Many proponents of authentic text...