Action Research: Applying a Bilingual Parallel Corpus Collocational Concordancer to Taiwanese Medical School EFL Academic Writing

Abstract

Lack of knowledge in the conventional usage of collocations in one’s respective field of expertise cause Taiwanese students to produce academic writing that is markedly different than more competent writing. This is because Taiwanese students are first and foremost English as a Foreign language (EFL) readers and may have difficulties picking up on the regularly encountered patterns of collocating words found in texts, since nothing on the page highlights collocations as such. As one step in determining a solution to this problem, this paper reports on action research that took place in an EFL writing classroom where undergraduate Taiwanese medical students (n = 25) were encouraged to self-edit their academic writing for verb-noun collocation errors through the use of a web-based English/Chinese bilingual parallel corpus collocational concordancer. Statistical analysis of students’ drafts revealed the use of the collocational concordancer resulted in verb-noun collocation accuracy increasing steadily with each subsequent draft for two essay types (i.e. descriptive and opinion). However, qualitative analysis of student feedback regarding their experience in using the collocational concordancer to self-edit their academic writing showed a difference in acceptance and success. Furthermore, students expressed negativity towards the EFL writing teacher requesting students to self-edit academic writing. The collocational concordancer functions, nuanced statistical results in terms of collocation accuracy, and pedagogical implications of the action research results are discussed.

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