Abstract:

The study examines the effect of training in online concordancing tools: British National Corpus (BNC) and Lextutor online concordancer, on Thai undergraduate students’ L2 collocation activation. The freeware concordancers were introduced to the experimental group; the subjects, therefore, accessed a collection of authentic texts (corpus) via various computer programmes with recommended concordancing tools. The control group, on the other hand, was asked to practice lexical units by the e-Diary method via M@xLearn, Kasetsart Universiyt (KU) e-Learning system.
Following a preliminary and pilot study, the intervention interwoven with the regular teaching by the practitioner, was conducted at KU, Bangkok, Thailand. The subjects, from two intact classrooms, group 5 and group 7, took the elective course: English Reading for Mass Communication (01355205). Regarding the randomly selected procedure, the former was a control group; and the latter was an experimental group.
Data were collected utilising two research instruments: pre- and post-tests of lexical items learning ability adapted from Nation’s (2001) Productive levels test: version C, and semi-structured interview administered at the end of the course to elicit the subjects’ attitudes and comments towards the using concordancers as new lexical learning tools. Furthermore, questions for the experimental group, were used to elicit the perceived effectiveness and ineffectiveness of the concordancers employed. The data obtained from the two research instruments were triangulated to confirm the validity and reliability of the research findings.
The Statistical Package for the Social Science (SPSS), ANOVA shows that after introducing freeware concordancers, the subjects from the experimental group significantly outperformed subjects from the control group in their ability to activate lexical items and had a positive attitude towards using concordancers. Moreover, the subjects from the experimental group showed an increased awareness of the need to autonomously apply freeware concordancers to further help master L2 lexical learning in various genres.

Keywords:

Freeware, concordancers, M@xLearn, BNC, Lextutor, e-Diary.