A Comparison of a Web-based Concordance and Conventional Method for Self- Correction in EFL Writing
Rajamangala University of Technology, Thailand
ABSTRACT
Students tend to define writing quality if their work is without errors while teachers pay much attention and spend large amounts of time on error feedback. In writing instruction, a problem occurring in any writing task is giving feedback on errors. Computer corpora and concordances can be an opportunity to be used as effective tools providing sufficiency of language examples for students to observe. These tools are useful for revealing grammatical patterns which dictionaries do not. The purposes of this research were (1) to compare the studies on using a web-based concordance for self-correction and conventional method in EFL writing; (2) to examine which types of grammatical errors are corrected and retained after using the web-based concordance; and (3) to study the satisfaction of students using the web-based concordance in self-correction. The research sample consisted of 40 English major students who enrolled in Essay Writing course. They were divided into 2 classes equally and obtained by convenient sampling. The research instruments comprised a web-based concordance of Lextutor, pretest and posttest, grammatical error-correction tasks, questionnaire and in-depth interview. Statistics for data analysis were the percentage, mean, standard deviation, and t-test to compare how significantly different the treatment from control group. Research findings indicated that the posttest scores of the students in the experimental group were higher than the pretest scores at the .05 level of statistical significance. Most of the students preferred using the web-based concordancer for self-correction in writing and perceived the corpus approach as beneficial to the development of their writing skill.
KEYWORDS
Web-based concordance, self-error correction, EFL writing, undergraduate students