A reflective summary of the article 'Can learners use concordance feedback for writing errors?' (Gaskell and Cobb, 2004)

In Gaskell and Cobb’s (2004) study, 20 low-intermediate level students enrolled in a 15-week English writing course at a university in Canada learnt how to use and practiced using an online concordancer to make corrections to the errors they made in their own written assignments. These errors, which were of a grammatical and collocational nature, were made explicit by the instructor during the initial period of training and students simply had to click the HTML links for the concordance before revising the errors. Following the training, the instructor stopped providing online concordance links.

The researchers aimed to answer the following questions:
i. Will learners consider the concordancing activity useful?
ii. Can learners use concordances to correct their errors?
iii. Will correcting with concordances reduce errors in free production?
iv. Will learners use concordances independently following training?

Several sources of data were collected, including pre-test and post-test writing samples, weekly error analysis forms, results of a student survey regarding attitudes toward the concordancing activity and network records of issuing IP addresses for concordance searches.

The main findings were that
- all the students felt that their writing skills had improved, although only 8 students attributed the improvement in their ability to use the grammar points targeted in the course to the corpus consultation work itself;
- students could independently work from concordance to correction even though this process did not necessarily help reduce the number of errors they made in their post-test writing samples.

Gaskell and Cobb’s (2004) study shows that using concordancing in writing classes can help provide feedback to students on word-level and sentence-level errors. This is especially important for second language learners, who do not have opportunities nor time to learn, as the authors put it, "through enormous amounts of brute practice in mapping meanings and situations to words and structures". They argue that such learners need to explore language through data-driven learning, which essentially means learning from exposure to examples containing repeated patterns which are made salient, as it provides opportunities for substantial amounts of practice on target errors which otherwise would only be met once in a while.

Although the participants in Gaskell and Cobb's (2004) study were adult literacy learners, the article that they have written inspires me to consider trying out a similar concordancing activity with my primary six students sometime in the near future. Nine times out of ten I would prefer to have students correct their own errors rather than do the corrections for them myself and online concordancers offer a gateway for me to achieve this. Many of my students are already actively blogging in English on a regular basis so it would be simply be a matter of having them copy and paste their writing into a Word Document and send them to me (or can I add precast links next to erroneous sentences in their blog postings??? - I don't think this is possible myself). I would imagine, however, that they would require more support, especially in terms of the amount of training and practice that they would need to master retrieving and interpreting concordance information. I would imagine also that pre-cast links would have to be provided indefinitely because many of my students have not reached the stage where they can easily locate and point out mistakes in their written compositions.