Abstract
The present study aims to investigate (1) the effectiveness of online units for synonymous adjectives, (2) students’ word use in writing after online learning, (3) the performance of learners with different learning styles, (4) students’ inductive learning, and (5) students’ perception of the online learning. Data-driven learning (DDL) was incorporated to engage learners in tasks for distinguishing synonymous adjectives from concordance lines in a bilingual collocation concordancer, TANGO, http://candle.cs.nthu.edu.tw/collocation/.Focusing on five overused adjectives--important, beautiful, hard, deep, and big--identified from analysis of learner corpus, each unit, http://candle.cs.nthu.edu.tw/ WriteBetter/Synonym/ShowIntroduction.asp, involved several synonyms of one of the five overused adjectives mentioned above and presented two tasks for practice. The first task required students to induce patterns from concordance lines of adjective-noun collocates from TANGO, and type in their findings in the notepad and summary page provided by the system. The second task included substitution, blank-filling, and translation exercises for students to actively practice employing a stronger and more specific adjective in context. A tracking system also constantly recorded students’ inductive learning and performance on doing the second task.19 English majors in a freshman writing class did the online exercises for 4 weeks. The instruments used included a pretest, two posttests, in addition to background and evaluation questionnaires. Students’ word use was observed in their two essay writing. Interviews were conducted for student perspectives and questions along the process.The findings indicated that students showed improvement in the immediate posttest. Moreover, their word knowledge for synonym use still retained in the delayed posttest after a time lapse of two months. In addition, it was found that students avoided using general adjectives and tried to apply more specific items in writing. Yet, the factor of learning styles did not influence students’ performance in the tests or the inductive learning process. Among the five sets of synonyms, the synonyms of hard were most difficult for students to acquire and find out the distinctions. As for students’ attitudes toward the learning units, a majority of them reported that the inductive learning was beneficial though they found it time-consuming and difficult to verbalize the differences among semantically similar words. TANGO was also considered a useful tool to learn synonyms and their collocates.In light of the findings, some pedagogical implications are drawn. First, TANGO could be helpful in facilitating the learning of the subtle differences among synonyms. Second, other types of vocabulary activities for the synonyms of hard could be further designed to help learners learn those words more successfully.