Abstract
In 2005, a nationwide English achievement assessment was held by National Academy for Educational Research Preparatory Office for primary school students in Taiwan. The findings of the study revealed that manipulating words and phrases to make sentences is a challenge for beginning learners of English at primary schools. The study also suggested that students need to cultivate the competence of organizing grammatical functions of words in a sentence. It is thus crucial to teach the beginning learners the grammatical functions of words to make sentences. However, few empirical studies have been conducted to investigate this issue. Nowadays many researchers and educators have explored the effectiveness of integrating information technologies in language learning and teaching. Among all kinds of technologies, web-based concordancing has been extensively used for writing and vocabulary learning. Nevertheless, most previous studies concerning concordancing have investigated the use by learners at the tertiary levels; research on primary school students is under-represented. To fill the void, the purpose of the study aims to investigate the effectiveness of concordancing on vocabulary learning at the primary school level, focusing on the learners’ development of word meaning, grammatical function, and sentence production with a time-series design. Seven fifth-graders from an intact class with varying proficient levels but similar computer literacy were involved in the study. They were trained to utilize a concordancer in the piloting phase. A Chinese-English concordancer specifically for Taiwanese primary school students has been developed with a corpus taken from sentences modeling their English textbooks. Besides, the concordancer is augmented with links to online dictionaries in case users need help with word senses. A self-designed vocabulary test was used in the pretest, treatment, and posttest phases, requiring the participants to provide the Chinese meanings and the grammatical functions of the words, and to use the words to create sentences. At the pretest phase, the participants completed a background questionnaire and were assessed with fifty-one verbs which were taken from their grade five and six textbooks for three times so as to obtain a baseline of their understanding of the verbs. Seven individualized word lists of the twelve verbs scored zero were assigned to the participants. Six out of the twelve verbs were common to all participants and selected as the target words. During the treatment phase, they consulted the concordancer to get the meanings and the grammatical functions of their individualized twelve verbs unknown to them in twelve sessions. Afterwards, they were assessed with two posttests and one delayed posttest in a lapse of four weeks after the second posttest. An interview for exploring the participants’ perceptions on concordancing was administered between the second posttest and the delayed posttest. Based on the results of the pretests, the target words were completely unknown to the participants in terms of the meaning, grammatical function, and sentence production aspects. During the concordancing treatment, their general performance of the vocabulary tests showed that they fostered the lexical knowledge of the six target words in terms of the three aspects. Even though their performances slightly declined in the delayed posttest, they were still better than those of the pretests, indicating they still retained the vocabulary knowledge. Through a variety of statistical analyses, it was demonstrated that their performances of the vocabulary tests in the treatment, the first two posttests, and the delayed posttest were significantly better than their entry performances in the pretests. The effects of concordancing lasted through the delayed posttest. As for their perspectives on the concordancing instruction, the participants held positive attitudes towards the concordance-enhanced vocabulary learning and agreed that it was helpful for them to understand the meanings and the grammatical functions through concordancing. The factors, such as proficiency levels, the analytical skills, the feature of time-consuming in data analysis, and the access to the computer, might affect their performances and attitudes towards the usefulness of concordancing and willingness to use it in the future. The findings of the study imply that the concordancing activity in the inductive approach is acceptable to most primary school participants since their traits of physical development and mental condition are taken into consideration. Furthermore, concordancing has a potential to scaffold the meanings and grammatical functions of words. The participants could produce sentences with searched words. The effects of concordancing could last up to six weeks. In conclusion, it is feasible to administer the concordancing instruction in primary school contexts.