use of concordances homework

Mike McDonald's concordance homework | Robert Haines | June 24th, 2005

Mike,

I just came across your very interesting action research results in the DL archive:

(Concordances for grammar awareness | Mike M. | September 28th , 2004)

"After reading a bit about the use of concordances for grammatical consciousness-raising (probably in Willis & Willis or Ellis) I gave two classes of my first-year university students a summer vacation task of looking at 10 pages of Cobuild concordance samples and making some observations about them.

Here are the results of that assignment. Each page contained 40 samples for the phrases "because", "however", "and", "also", "but", "such as", "for example", and "besides", respectively. (All of these phrases are frequently misused or wrongly punctuated.)"

Ramesh mentions in the thread that it would be interesting to follow up on how much of the information was internalized:

"But it would be useful to check (at some point) how much of this information was internalized (how would one best measure that?). Do let me know if you decide to do this. I'd be very interested in the results."

Since I'm in the middle of the AWD, I'm reading a lot into Ramesh's use of 'how much', meaning that I think he's inclined to believe that some of the information was internalized, although the answer could be 'none.'

Question: Have you found a way to indicate whether students internalized (needs defining, that term) the information, and, if so, have you followed up on it?

Also, you mentioned students' noticing:

"I don't know how much they have internalized, but they seem to have noticed an amazing number of details."

Do you mean 'noticing' as in the controversial SLA term, or just that students, prompted by your summer vacation task questions, found relevant answers?

I enjoyed reading your research results, and the thread on Concordances and Grammar Awareness is useful for anyone interested in this area. It's generated some ideas for possible GLE assignment ideas for me.

Best,

Rob

Re: concordance homework results | Mike McDonald | June 25th, 2005

Hi Rob,

Thanks for reminding me about the summer vacation assignment I gave my first-year students last year. Summer vacation is rapidly approaching again, and perhaps I can do something similar this year. I'm ashamed to say I didn't follow up with last year's students to see if they had internalised the information they noticed. In fact, I must have completely forgotten about it soon after the thread ended. Probably I thought for a while about how to test the level of internalisation, and then decided it would be too difficult to do so across the whole range of expressions.

My original intention was to draw the students' attention to the way that the 10 expressions were used, in the hope that those who were at an appropriate stage of readiness might "acquire" the most important features. As you may have noticed, I asked them three questions about each page of concordances:

1. How many instances of each phrase begin with a capital letter?

2. What punctuation is used before and after each phrase, and how many examples of each can you find?

3. Write anything you notice about the examples.

The real focus of the task was questions 1 and 2 - I got so tired of reading students' journals that were strings of sentences beginning with "And", "So", and "Because" that I wanted to show them that these were not at all common in native-speaker English. Question 3 was added to provide a bit more interest and opportunity for investigation. I didn't expect the students to come up with much, but they surprised me.

I haven't explored the concept of "noticing" in any great detail, but have read quite a lot about it incidentally in van Lier, Ellis, Willis and WiIlis, Scovel, Skehan, et al. I find it an appealing concept as a basis for acquisition, but it's a very slippery one, since it is not directly measurable, and there are so many possible levels, ranging from completely unconscious noticing to total absorption. Intuitively, one would expect that the latter kind of noticing would promote acquisition more reliably, but I wonder if that's really the case. In my own experience of learning Japanese, I often find words popping up that I have no recollection of studying, whereas the phrases I pored over and copied out repeatedly have often evaporated after a few days.

Mike

 

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