Concordance feedback

I think most of us here had a great time last night listening to Dr. Milton and navigating our way around the My Words application. But do you guys remember him mentioning the use of a concordance?

According to the omnipotent Wikipedia, a concordance is "an alphabetical list of the principal words used in a book or body of work, with their immediate contexts". In other words, it is a database of commonly used words, sentences and expressions. Gaskell and Cobb's article talks about just that as the writer's investigate a computer concordance that provides feedback to sentence-level written errors.

Unlike spelling, errors in sentences are usually grammatical in nature, which makes them less straightforward to explain. Hence, Gaskell and Cobb suggest a feedback driven system that emphasizes on repeated sentence patterns rather than on abstract terms. Also, they aim to make concordance information more accessible to lower-intermediate L2 writers. Indeed, some of these programs are more suited for advanced learners as the words and sentences used are often too advanced for the average learner to comprehend (a la My Words). Another concern is that there seems to be a discrepancy as to whether or not feedback is beneficial to the writer. On one hand, it is seen as discouraging to learners while others consider it an indispensible part of learning and error reduction. Gaskell and Cobb surmise that it's unrealistic to achieve anything significant short term as learners must have enough exposure to common patterns to generate any improvement. In any event, the writers are only interested in developing a principled feedback resource of formative evaluation that learners are able to use.

The system that Gaskell and Cobb advocate is one that includes an upload program for submission, a corpus and concordancer that can code structure information in a URL and a form submitter for learners to enter their responses to the concordance information. They hope that learners would be able to correct their errors thorugh the concordance info and that corrections would be made with some kind of understanding. Errors were hoped to diminish and independent access was also an expected outcome. Their study shows that learners are willing to use concordances for their grammar and that they are able to make appropriate corrections. Independent concordancing was achieved with a useful training system and learners were able to make sense of the system and the feedback generated. However, trialling is found to be too inclusive and a research-and-development approach that covers various learner behaviors are advocated.

All in all, Gaskell and Cobb's article presents an interesting view on corpus and concordancing but at the high school level, we are still at the very primitive stage of using pen and paper for feedback. I'm sure my colleagues would welcome such a system but who's going to all the uploading and data entry? Who's going to provide all the hyperlinks for the erros? While my school does have an online homework submission system for Math, I don't think we're going to implement it for English as many of my colleagues prefer hard copies that they can write on. They find turning on the computer and going through the applications time-consuming as a good ol' red ball point pen can achieve the same, if not more. Believe it or not, they would rather go with a regular dictionary than the My Words application. Bottom line is, the less computers factor in, the better. Besides, students never read what you give them as they are only concerned about the mark/score/grade and those who do read the feedback will eventually approach you. The picture is pretty bleak, I know, but I'm not giving up hope just yet. I will keep trying to implement more IT into my teaching.