Online Learning Units on Underused Adjectives for College EFL Students
Online Learning Units on Underused Adjectives for
College EFL Students
Yi-Hsin Lee (李怡欣)
Yu-Li Yeh (葉由俐)
National Tsing Hua University
[email protected] [email protected]
This study aims to design and evaluate five online units for increasing students’
awareness of underused adjectives for EFL writing. Data-driven learning (DDL) was
incorporated to engage learners in distinguishing synonymous adjectives from a bilingual
collocation concordancer, TANGO. Each unit involves several synonyms of one of five
overused adjectives, important, beautiful, hard, deep, and big, and presents two tasks for
practice. The first task requires students to induce patterns from concordance lines of
adjective-noun collocates from TANGO. The second task was for students to actively
practice employing a stronger and more specific adjective in context. 19 English majors in
a freshman writing class did the online exercises for 4 weeks. The findings indicated that,
from the three controlled tests, students made significant improvement in the immediate
posttest and retained their word knowledge for synonym use after a time lapse of two
months. In writing, moreover, students avoided using general adjectives and tried to apply
more specific items. As for the learning process, a majority of the students reported that
inductive learning was beneficial though they found it time-consuming and sometimes
difficult to verbalize the differences among semantically similar words. Finally, with
mutual translation, TANGO was considered a useful tool for learning synonyms and their
collocates.
INTRODUCTION
To communicate messages effectively in writing, writers are expected to avoid general
terms or overused modifiers and use specific words. A case study comparing the corpora of
French learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) and native speakers (NS) by Granger
and Tribble (1998) explicitly points out the phenomenon of overused adjectives by non-native
learners (NNS). The EFL learners are apt to be too dependent on superordinates such as real,
important, and different throughout their text due to the lexical poverty of most learner output.
Such phenomenon that learners overuse the above adjectives is what Ham and Rundell
(1994:178, cited in Granger and Tribble, 1998) termed the default terms, a factor which makes
a writing task a weak one. The finding contributes pedagogical implications for foreign
language teaching and learning, and language teachers should encourage learners to employ
words with a higher degree of specificity for successful communication.
In order to solve the problem in overusing general adjectives, the use of concordancing
with data-driven learning (DDL) could be an alternative to help learners. DDL presents
abundant examples for learners to discover rules from contextual clues and examples in corpus
evidence (Johns and King, 1991). Moreover, presenting concordance data to learners can
help learners successfully discriminate among semantically similar items and attend to their
collocational patterns and semantic features (Partington, 1998). The purpose of the present
study therefore is to develop and evaluate online DDL learning units for helping learners apply
synonymous alternatives of underused adjectives. It is hoped that students will be able to use
more specific words and avoid the overused items in writing after they complete the
instructional units.
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Yi-Hsin Lee (李怡欣) & Yu-Li Yeh (葉由俐)
LITERATURE REVIEW AND RESEARCH QUESTIONS
Before bringing about our research issues, we will first review previous studies in the areas
of vocabulary learning, comparison between learner corpus and native corpus, and implications
for English synonym teaching and learning.
Vocabulary Learning
In this section, we focus mainly on the importance of word selection in writing as well as
the causes for vocabulary errors and the teaching of synonyms.
Vocabulary and Writing. The importance of word selection for writing has been
recognized by Johnson (2000), who stresses that the compared with a reader, a writer is more
obligated to be precise and should use the right word so as to express the intended messages.
Studies have shown that vocabulary improvement and lexical selection in writing tasks were
emphasized by evaluators of student writing. In one of the major studies in this area, Santo
(1998) indicated that lexical errors were considered the most serious problems. Another study
by Engber (1995) pointed out that the diversity of lexical choice and the correctness of lexical
forms had a significant effect on reader judgment of the overall quality of essays written by L2
writers with intermediate to high-intermediate proficiency. Taking into consideration the
frustration that learners experienced in spending much time searching for appropriate lexical
items but still expressing themselves with imprecision, Santos (1988) suggested that lessons on
vocabulary building and lexical selection be incorporated into an ESL writing course. The
lessons should be designed with emphasis on the importance of lexical choice and elicitation or
presentation of synonymous expressions
Vocabulary Errors and Synonym Teaching. Martin (1984) examined vocabulary
errors among advanced learners and suggested that the teaching of vocabulary via glosses or
synonyms in the target language could possibly lead to improper lexical choices. When it is
implied that an old word would act as the equivalency for a new item, learners might take the
two words as exactly interchangeable alternatives. Further, if an exercise simply requires the
learner to replace one item in a sentence with a new one in a list, the differences are likely left
behind. It is cautioned that learners must be guided to notice whether synonyms behave
identically in all contexts and to appreciate the subtle distinctions among semantically related
words. What a teacher should do is to compare and contrast new words by pointing out the
nearest neighbors and different situations in which each word occurs.
Comparison Between Learner Corpus and Native Corpus
The use of adjectives in writing was under investigation with a comparison between the
Louvain corpus (French learners of English, 227,964 words) and a core subset of BNC
(1,080,072 words) by Granger and Tribble (1998). The study showed that advanced French
students used such adjectives as real, different, important, longer and true more frequently than
proficient NS writers. It is revealed that learners tend to be overreliant on superordinate
adjectives such as important in their academic writing, while excluding words with higher
degree of specificity such as critical/crucial /major/serious/significant/vital, and so forth.
Another contrastive study was launched by Gui and Yang (2002), who developed Chinese
Learner English Corpus (CLEC) which comprises 1,185,977 words from writing of
intermediate to advanced learners. They compared it with other corpora of English speakers.
The comparison of big, great, and large used between CLEC and FLOB (Freiburg
Lancaster-Oslo/Bergen) Corpus revealed that Chinese learners used great more frequently.
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Gui and Yang (2002) pointed out that Chinese learners regarded great as a general intensifier to
apply to any cases. Besides, the misuse of big and large indicated that learners were still not
familiar with their collocates.
As a result, researchers advocate applying the results to pedagogy. Flowerdew (2001)
has suggested that the findings from these comparative studies be utilized in design of
materials to address students’ needs and deficiencies, as has been the case in the compilation of
dictionaries for NNS. Instead of giving form-focused instruction based on language teachers’
intuition, Granger and Tribble (1998) proposed the idea of utilizing NNS learner data for a
more systematic account of learner difficulties.
Tschichold (2003) has also explicitly
recommended that computer assisted language learning (CALL) activities can be adapted to
help learners actively practice alternative words or expressions for the overused items. Such
vocabulary enhancement activity could serve to strengthen learners’ knowledge of the target
adjectives after the presentation of the teaching materials in the activity.
Implications for English Synonym Teaching and Learning
This section particularly emphasizes the pedagogical implications of studying corpus data
recommended by researchers. In addition, a collocation concordancer aid, TANGO, is
introduced for its application to synonym learning.
The Importance of Studying Corpus Data. The study by Harvey and Yuill (1997)
gave a detailed account of what role the Collins COBUILD English Language Dictionary
(CCELD) (1987) played in the completion of written tasks by EFL learners. The learners
were required to identify and distinguish various types of information about the word they
could look for. Of the reasons for the look-ups, synonym searching was the fourth most
frequent one. However, 36.1% of synonym searches were reported by the informants to be
unsuccessful. In almost all these cases, the users indicated that the entry did not give them the
information they need for using the alternatives. Although CCELD offers an extra column for
main source synonyms, it fails to explicitly present with the synonyms their register,
connotation, difference of nuance, or collocation, clues that will make it evident for learners to
choose an appropriate one for use from the list. Learners, therefore, may encounter difficulty
in selecting an appropriate synonym especially when they have little access to how the given
synonyms occur in particular contexts. The suggestion made by Harvey and Yuill was to
provide synonyms in conjunction with their collocational patterns, semantic features, and
stylistic guidance rather than an implied equivalent alone. Corpus data, therefore, is a
powerful alternative to serve such purpose in vocabulary learning and teaching.
A Bilingual Collocation Aid–TANGO. As mentioned, encouraging learners to study
collocational patterns of semantically similar words would be effective for synonym teaching.
Therefore, a collocation aid, TANGO, is selected as a helpful tool to retrieve adjective-noun
(AN) collocation from Sinoroma parallel corpus (Wu, et al., 2003). When the user types in a
word, TANGO can display relevant citations in the bilingual corpus with (a) highlighted words
and collocates, (b) occurrence counts, (c) clustered citations according to collocates, and (d)
sorted citations according to frequency of collocation. Therefore, when the user submits a
query of an adjective, possible AN collocates will be displayed on the return page. The
distinguishing advantage of the bilingual collocation aid is that the highlighted collocates are
shown with translation equivalents in context. With the availability of Chinese counterparts,
users can easily examine the relevant instances that they need. It is claimed (Wu, et al., 2003)
that the collocation concordancer is beneficial for inductive learning to intermediate or
advanced learners, that is, the target learners in our study.
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Yi-Hsin Lee (李怡欣) & Yu-Li Yeh (葉由俐)
Research Questions
Research on concordancing learning has provided strong evidence in that synonym
learning through analyzing corpus data is particularly recommended for clarifying differences
in meaning. Furthermore, words with apparent similarity in meaning still should be taught
with their typical collocates (Harvey & Yull, 1997; Partington, 1998). Therefore, it is
necessary to design concordance-based materials to increase learners’ awareness of
collocations of near-synonyms for appropriate word use.
Following the principles for
designing concordance-based exercise (Hunston, 2002), our study uses NNS learner data in
identifying learning difficulties and focusing on five overused adjectives by Taiwanese EFL
learners. The study thus will address three research questions:
1.
2.
3.
Are the online learning units effective in students’ learning of synonymous
adjectives in a controlled context?
Will the online material improve students’ use of synonymous adjectives in writing?
What is students’ feedback on the concordance-based exercises?
RESEARCH METHOD
In this section, we will include description of the background of the participants, the
instruments to be used, the development of materials, data collection procedures, and data
analysis.
Participants
The study involved an intact class of 19 freshman students from the Department of
Foreign Languages and Literature in National Tsing Hua University. The participants took
freshman writing as a required course which contained 2 periods per week and each period last
for 50 minutes. Most of the students had received formal instruction on English for six years
during their junior and senior high school years.
Instruments
Two types of instruments, tests and questionnaires, were used in the study. First, three
tests, a pretest and two posttests, immediate and delayed, were designed to assess learners’
synonym learning. There were two testing types, translation and blank-filling items, equally
distributed to the five sets of synonyms--important, beautiful, hard, deep, and big. Two sets
of questionnaires were designed to first obtain information about students’ background and
their preference for learning at the outset of the study, and later students’ perception of the
online practices after the experiment period.
Material Development
Since insights derived from learner corpus can provide a basis for improving learners’
overuse of adjectives (Granger and Tribble, 1998), the present study initiated a comparison
between non-native speaker (NNS) corpus of Taiwanese learners and native speaker (NS)
corpus before designing the online units. The NNS learner corpus contains, with a total of
114,045 words, descriptive and argumentative essays by freshman English-major students of
National Tsing Hua University. The NS data for contrastive analysis is LOCNESS corpus,
consisting of 66,598 words of argumentative writing by British students. The analysis was
carried out by comparing word frequencies in the two corpora so as to identify overused
adjectives by EFL students. Based on the result yielded from the comparison, important,
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beautiful, big, hard, and deep were the five words chosen to help improve the phenomenon of
overuse. The comparison of high-frequency vocabulary in the Taiwanese learner corpus
reveals that Taiwanese learners tend to use these relatively general words with a significantly
higher frequency than native speakers do.
To select synonymous words for our target learners, WordNet were chosen because detailed
information for distinguishing semantically similar words is provided in it. However, since
Tschichold (2003) stressed that learners needed to be offered comprehensible alternative words
or expressions for practice, we then select only those words with higher frequency in British
National Corpus (BNC) to serve as the target words for learning. Finally, to facilitate students
learning with induction, only synonyms with sufficient instances provided by Sinoroma
parallel corpora were selected (Wu, et al., 2003).
Following Hunston’s (2002) suggestion, a list of synonyms was presented first in each
learning unit. Learners would read the example sentences of each target synonym and make
notes on a notepad online in the system. After reading the examples, learners would induce
patterns and make a summary of how the synonyms can be appropriately used. Finally,
exercises were provided to reinforce the synonymous adjective learning. There were in total
five learning units developed in the environment, one for each of the five overused words
identified.
Procedures
In the first week, background questionnaire was administered and students took the
pretest. Students wrote on the topic, “Why I choose to study in Tsing Hua University” as the
first writing task in the second week. They were also instructed on how to use the online
learning units in a demonstration provided by the researcher. During the following four
weeks, students were required to do various tasks in each of the five units for 20 minutes in
class and complete the rest after class. In the sixth week, students took the immediate posttest
and filled out the evaluation questionnaire. The researcher also interviewed students for
general perception about the units or further clarification needed for their responses to the
evaluation questionnaire. Later in the semester, students wrote the second composition about
persuading an international student to study in Tsing Hua University. Students took the
delayed posttest at around the end of the semester, 8 weeks after the immediate posttest.
Data Analysis
Both quantitative and qualitative data collected were analyzed to answer the research
questions. The quantitative data from the pretest, the posttest and the delayed posttest were
used to evaluate the effectiveness of the online learning units.
The data from the background
questionnaire, the evaluation questionnaire and interviews were coded and analyzed to present
students’ feedback of the online units.
RESEARCH RESULTS
In the following section, the results of the tests, students’ use of adjectives in writing, and
students’ feedback on the online units will be discussed.
The Results of the Three Tests
Because of the small sample size (N=19), Nonparametric Method was employed to
analyze the test results. Wilcoxon Singed Ranks test was run to see if there were significant
differences between (1) total scores of the pretest and the posttest (2) total scores of the posttest
and the delayed posttest (Table 4.1). The total score of the pretest was significantly higher
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Yi-Hsin Lee (李怡欣) & Yu-Li Yeh (葉由俐)
than the posttest (p=.000< .05) with no significant difference found in the comparison of the
posttest and the delayed posttest. Hence, the positive results indicated that students’
knowledge of synonyms had increased significantly after completion of the learning units.
Additionally, students generally did not show much regression in the delayed posttest. The
answer to research question 1,therefore, is that the online units did enhance students’ learning
of synonymous words.
Table 4.1 Result of Comparison Among Three Tests by Wilcoxon Signed Rank Sum Test
Asymp. Sig.
N
Mean Rank Sum of Ranks
Z score
(1-tailed)
a
.00
.00
Immediate Negative Ranks 0
Post-Pre Positive Ranks 19b 10.00
190.00
-.318a
.000*
Ties
0c
Total
19
d
9.00
81.00
Delayed Negative Ranks 9
Post-Pre Positive Ranks 8e
9.00
72.00
-.214a
.426*
Ties
2f
Total
19
Note1: *p< .05
a. immediate post< pre
d. delayed post< pre
Note2:
b. immediate post> pre
e. delayed post> pre
c. immediate post = pre
f. delayed post = pre
Since the test was composed of questions equally distributed to the five adjectives,
further analysis was done into how students performed in the five sets of adjective and which
synonymous adjectives were more effectively learned by the participants, given the online
design. Figure 4.1 showed the mean scores of the five sets of synonyms. The result revealed
that the mean score of hard was the lowest in the pretest. In the immediate posttest, important
had the highest mean while the mean score of hard was the lowest. Students were found to
obtain lowest scores for big in the delayed posttest. Thus, we could infer that students learned
more for the synonyms of important, but they acquire less knowledge for synonyms of hard,
after the online learning. Compared to the synonyms of the other four adjectives, the learning
unit might be less effective for students to learn the synonyms of big.
20
15
important
beautiful
10
hard
big
5
deep
0
pretest
immediate posttest
delayed posttest
important
7.05
16.37
16.26
beautiful
7.58
15.42
14.47
hard
5.32
12.53
13.37
big
8.21
13.32
12.42
deep
7.32
14.05
15.11
Figure 4.1 The Mean Scores for the Five Sets of Synonyms
Students’ Adjective Use in Writing
How students use the adjectives in their actual writing is now analyzed to answer research
question 2. Both the total words and the observed adjectives (the five overused adjectives,
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Online Learning Units on Underused Adjectives for College EFL Students
important, beautiful, hard, deep, and big, and their synonyms) in the two essays were
calculated respectively. The observed adjectives, then, were marked for their being general or
specific. The first essay had a total of 3,336 words with 17 general adjectives while the
second essay 4,578 words in total with 30 general and 21 specific adjectives.
Our first step was to normalize the length of writing, that is, total words were divided by
100 to obtain the unit for each composition. Since not every student used the observed
adjectives in both writing assignments, we only included students who employed the target
items in both their first and the second essays for our description here. Table 4.2 showed the
general and specific adjectives used by these students.
Table 4.2 Students’ Adjective Use in the First and Second Compositions
The first essay
The second essay
Trend
1
2
3
4
General/Unit
Specific/Unit
General/Unit
S1
1/1.44
3/2.61
Specific/Unit
S14
1/1.6
3/2.21
S9
1/1.66
2/2.06
1/2.06
S16
3/1.68
6/2.13
3/2.13
S18
1/1.99
1/1.57
1/1.57
S6
2/1.83
1/1.37
S8
1/1.09
2/2.38
S12
1/2.03
1/2.66
1/2.66
S15
1/1.55
1/2.53
2/2.53
S17
2/1.49
1/2.59
Four trends of students’ word use of specific or general adjectives in the two essays
surfaced. The first was that students S1 and S14 still used the general and overused items
without the awareness of employing specific alternatives. The second was that students S9,
S16 and S18 did not improve in using general words but had tried to apply specific adjectives
in their second writing task. S6 and S8, in the third category, had reduced the number of
overused items. Finally, there were students who not only avoided the general adjectives but
also learned to use words with a higher degree of specificity, as S12, S15 and S17. Generally
speaking, except S1 and S14 in category 1, the students sampled for observing their word use
in writing made improvement in reducing using general words and/or using more specific
alternatives quantitatively.
Next, how students actually used the target items in writing was compared. In the first
essay, it was found that no specific adjective items had been used by students. Three general
words, important, beautiful and big, occurred frequently in student’ writing. Among the three
general words, beautiful, which was used to describe the campus or the view in the university,
had the most frequent occurrences. Similar to the first essay, the three general adjectives,
important, beautiful and big occurred in students’ second essay and beautiful was still the most
frequently used. However, some students had tried to apply alternatives such as lovely,
instead of beautiful, to “campus” and “scene”. Another noteworthy instance was that students
learned to use crucial as in the sentence, “it is crucial for a school to have the quality of
humanity”. The comparison evidenced that students used more specific adjectives such as
crucial, significant, lovely, and pretty after learning through online units.
It could also be inferred that the online units raised students’ awareness of avoiding using
overused and general items. For instance, with the concept of beautiful, we found that
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Yi-Hsin Lee (李怡欣) & Yu-Li Yeh (葉由俐)
students were able to employ more specific adjectives which were not included in the online
unit. The examples were splendid/enchanting/
gorgeous scenery, picturesque environment/view and wonderful campus.
After the
completion of the learning units, students themselves were able to look for an appropriate
substitute to express their ideas.
Students’ Feedback on the Online Units
An evaluation questionnaire was administered, after the completion of the units, to obtain
information about the participants’ perception of the online learning units. For students’
general attitude, around half of the students (52.6%) reported that they liked the synonym
learning, 36.8 % held neutral responses and 10.5% of students responded with a negative
attitude. Half of the students (53.1%) found it difficult to make distinctions among
semantically similar words, and a majority of students (72.7%) indicated that it took much time
to analyze corpus data. Despite such difficulties, the participants mostly (73.7%) agreed that
mutual translations in the bilingual concordances helped them learn English synonyms
effectively and a large portion of students (84.2%) reported that reading concordance lines
could help them consider the subtle differences among the collocates of synonymous words.
An interview with the participants was also conducted after the immediate posttest. For
the improvement of the online units, students indicated that the system was sometimes unstable
and there should be a clear leave-taking message after they complete the exercises. As for
TANGO, a few students mentioned that the some Chinese equivalents were misleading in the
bilingual corpora. Furthermore, when students wanted to consult the corpora of VOA (Voice
of America) or BNC, the connection speed was oftentimes quite slow. In sum, the results of
the third research question showed that a great majority of students perceived the synonymous
learning with the concordancer positively.
CONCLUSION
This study targets at investigating whether online learning units could increase EFL
learners’ awareness of synonymous adjectives and application of them in writing. 19 English
majors in a freshman writing class did the online exercises for 4 weeks. The major findings
indicated that students made significant improvement of synonym use in controlled context.
Students’ word knowledge still retained in a time lapse after they finished the online learning.
In writing, moreover, students avoided using general adjectives and/or tried to apply more
specific items. Students’ feedback showed that they did benefit from inductive concordancing
learning though it was time-consuming and somehow difficult to verbalize the differences
among synonymous words.
Two pedagogical implications can be drawn for EFL teachers and researchers from the
findings. First, to decrease students’ difficulty when engaged in studying corpus data, their
induction skill needs more training at the onset of the study. As the traditional teaching
method emphasized deductive teaching, one that most students were more familiar with, they
lacked the experience of discovering patterns or rules from authentic language data.
Consequently, more guidance should be offered by teachers if concordancing is to be
incorporated into the curriculum. Second, the bilingual collocation concordancer, TANGO,
could be used for facilitating student vocabulary learning since it offers appropriate AN
collocations and provides alternative words for writing. When teachers present semantically
related words, the information from TANGO would benefit students in comparing and
contrasting the synonymous items. In addition, TANGO could serve as a consulting tool for
learners to search, through possible collocates, for a proper alternative adjective for use in
writing.
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In the current study, the small number of participants is one major limitation. For future
research, more participants in different major areas could be invited so that the result can be
generalized to other population of EFL learners with different background. Also, more
writing should be collected in order to increase the size of learner corpus for investigation and
elicit additional data of students’ adjective use in free production. Further, a longitudinal
study could be conducted to observe students’ word use over a longer duration since students
might need more time to acquire the semantically similar words before being able to apply
them in actual writing.
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