The Use of Linking Adverbials in Academic Essays by Non-native Writers

13 Pages·2013·0.19 MB·English

by  Esther Horn

The Use of Linking Adverbials in Academic Essays
by Non-native Writers: How Data-driven Learning
Can Help

JAMES R. GARNER

University of Alabama

ABSTRACT

Over the past several decades, the TESOL community has seen an increased interest
in the use of data-driven learning (DDL) approaches. Most studies of DDL have
focused on the acquisition of vocabulary items, including a wide range of information
necessary for their correct usage. One type of vocabulary that has yet to be properly
investigated has been linking adverbials. Linking adverbials serve to assist writers in
giving cohesion to their texts. They are also difficult for second language writers to
acquire, with many language learners misusing them semantically and stylistically.
This study attempts to determine if DDL can assist students with this task. It
investigates the correct semantic usage and proportion of academic linking adverbials
in student writing both before and following treatment. Results indicate that DDL
techniques do in fact help students acquire and better employ linking adverbials in
their writing. Students receiving DDL instruction made greater improvements in their
use of linking adverbials, both semantically and stylistically, compared to a group that
received traditional linking adverbial instruction.

KEYWORDS

Data-driven Learning, Vocabulary Acquisition, Linking Adverbials, Second Language Writing, Academic
Word Transfer

INTRODUCTION

Modern electronic language corpora, with their large amounts of data and increasing
availability, have brought about many changes to the field of language pedagogy. They
have assisted instructors and textbook writers in creating better descriptions of the
workings of the target language and in presenting students with more realistic examples of
language in use. They have also led to changes in how language is taught. Following the
edict by Johns (1991) that, “research is too important to be left to the researcher” (p. 2),
researchers and instructors have been investigating ways students can be given direct
access to corpora for their own learning. This approach, known as data-driven learning
(DDL) (John, 1991), drastically changes the dynamic in the language classroom. In this
approach, the corpus becomes an informant, holding vast amounts of text available for
study. The student changes from being a simple receiver of information to now being a
language researcher, examining language evidence and reaching their own conclusions. The
teacher, formerly an all-knowing dispenser of information, now becomes a coordinator of
research, guiding the learner in the study of the target language. This approach gives the
learner control, allowing him or her to form his or her own hypotheses of language usage. It
also moves language learning from a deductive approach to an inductive one, helping
learners improve their ability to make individual generalizations from their encounters with
the target language (Bernardini, 2004; Johns, 1991). Despite these possible advantages,
DDL has yet to be fully accepted in many language classrooms. This is partially due to
several critiques of the approach, such as its emphasis on bottom-up processing, reliance on
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inductive learning, and the lack of authenticity of concordance lines (Braun, 2005;
Flowerdew, 2009). Despite these critiques, evidence from empirical studies has shown that
DDL can be beneficial to student vocabulary acquisition (Cobb, 1997, 1999; Horst, Cobb, &
Nicolae, 2005; Kaur & Hegelheimer, 2005; Lin, 2008).

Data-Driven Learning, which has been shown to be effective in the acquisition of academic
vocabulary (Kaur & Hegelheimer, 2005; Lin, 2008), can also be applied to the study of
linking adverbials (LAs), which assist academic writers in giving cohesion to their texts.
Writers can use LAs to reveal to readers the connections between sections in their text,
which makes it more cohesive as well as more persuasive. Thus, the ability to properly use
LAs is important for second language writers to acquire. Unfortunately, because their use is
complex, this task can be difficult (Celce-Muria & Larsen-Freeman, 1999; Conrad, 1999; Liu,
2008). For the most part, traditional language instruction in their use has been of little help
as it has ignored slight differences in meaning and register appropriateness (Crewe, 1990;
Zamel, 1983). This has led second language writers to misuse this vocabulary semantically,
signaling incorrect semantic relationships, and stylistically, using register-inappropriate LAs
in academic writing (Altenberg & Tapper, 1998; Chen, 2006; Granger & Tyson, 1996; Lei,
2012; Milton & Tsang, 1993; Tankó, 2004). While many studies have been focused on
student use of linking adverbials, few have focused on possible solutions to the problems
students face (Cresswell, 2004).

RESEARCH QUESTIONS

This study attempts to provide evidence for the effectiveness of DDL approaches to the
acquisition of LAs by second language writers in an academic writing course. The focus of
this study is on the correct semantic and register-appropriate usage of LAs in student
writing both before and after instruction. In doing so, it is hoped that the rationale for
including some DDL approaches in second language writing courses can be strengthened. In
addition, this study aims to provide language instructors with better tools for helping
students employ LAs in their writing. The study was guided by the following research
questions:

1. Can DDL be more effective in helping learners acquire a productive knowledge of
LAs compared to more traditional approaches?
2. Can DDL be more effective in helping learners acquire an awareness of the
differences between LA use in speaking and academic writing compared to more
traditional approaches?

LITERATURE REVIEW

Data-Driven Learning

Data-driven learning can be helpful to vocabulary acquisition for several reasons. Reporting
the results from DDL studies, Nation (2001) claims that DDL allows learners to encounter
new vocabulary in real and multiple contexts, allowing them to gain a much richer amount
of information about a lexical item. In other words, they are not learning just word
meaning, but other aspects of word knowledge such as phraseology, collocations, and
register appropriateness. Additionally, forming generalizations from this information can
help students gain a deeper understanding of the vocabulary, aiding retention. In two
studies, Cobb (1997, 1999) claimed that DDL approaches can help language teachers
provide their students with sufficient and appropriate input for vocabulary acquisition in a
more efficient manner. He stated that a set of concordance lines, which he describes as “a
word list with contexts for each word” (Cobb, 1999, p. 347), can help language learners
increase both the breadth and depth of their word knowledge quicker than they could in
more traditional methods.

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The two above-mentioned studies by Cobb (1997, 1999) and one by Horst, Cobb, and
Nicolae (2005) lend support to the claims for the effectiveness of DDL in vocabulary
instruction. In the first study (Cobb, 1997), students who received alternating concordance
instruction and dictionary instruction vastly improved their vocabulary knowledge from pre-
test to post-test. Comparing the two types of instruction, the author found that the
students’ weekly quiz scores were higher in the weeks they received concordance
instruction than in the weeks they did not. In the second study (Cobb, 1999), two groups,
one using the concordancing program and one using word lists and a dictionary,
experienced strong gains in definitional knowledge of new vocabulary, although this
knowledge was restricted to the short term for students in the dictionary group.
Furthermore, only students in the test group were able to use this knowledge productively
in both the short-term weekly quizzes and the long term post-test. Subjects in the study by
Horst, Cobb, and Nicolae (2005) made significant gains in word knowledge after
participating in an experimental ESL vocabulary course that included DDL approaches.
Following instruction, students were better able to write a definition or example sentences
for target words. The results from these studies show that concordancing can help students
acquire both receptive and productive knowledge of new vocabulary.

The previous studies provide evidence that students can use vocabulary acquired through
DDL in gap-filling and sentence-writing activities. However, they do not indicate whether
students can transfer this word knowledge to their own writing. Kaur and Hegelheimer
(2005) attempted to fill this gap with their study comparing the use of concordancing with
that of an online dictionary to learn vocabulary beneficial to fluency in writing. In both the
cloze test and the sentence building test following treatment, the test group did not perform
significantly better than the control group. In the assigned writing task, subjects from both
groups used the target vocabulary, but the subjects in the test group used them more than
the control group. They also used them correctly significantly more often, indicating that
transfer of academic word knowledge from concordancing to academic writing is possible.
Students in a study by Lin (2008) used online instructional materials to study the Academic
Word List (AWL) (Coxhead, 2000). In the test of receptive knowledge, a definition matching
test, students only performed slightly better following treatment. However, in the test of
productive knowledge, a sentence-building test, students performed significantly better. The
ratio of AWL words in subject essays increased immediately following treatment and, while
declining in the delayed post-treatment essay, was still much higher than in the pre-
treatment essay. It appears, then, that DDL can not only allow students to make gains in
their receptive and productive vocabulary knowledge, but also enables them to transfer this
new knowledge to their own writing, improving its overall quality.

Linking Adverbials

Linking adverbials (LAs), cohesive devices that create semantic connections between
different sections of a text (e.g., furthermore, nevertheless), have been widely studied in
the second language writing literature. These devices signal to readers the complex ways
ideas in a text relate to each other and form a larger meaning (Halliday & Hasan, 1976). In
addition, these devices have a rhetorical function, making them especially important in
academic writing. By overtly signaling to readers how pieces of information work together to
support a claim, LAs can help writers make a stronger and more persuasive argument to
their audience (Mauranen, 1993).

While LAs are very useful in academic writing, they are quite complex to correctly employ
because they can convey a vast array of meanings with subtle differences between them,
can have more than one meaning, can appear in more than one form, and can occur in
different places within a sentence (Celce-Muria & Larsen-Freeman, 1999; Liu, 2008; Conrad,
1999). This complexity makes LAs difficult to teach and for second language writers to
properly acquire. Traditional instruction on LAs has been of little assistance, as most writing
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textbooks give students simple lists of supposedly interchangeable LAs that ignore slight
differences in meaning and register variation. This has the effect of causing learners to
misuse linking adverbials both semantically and stylistically (Crewe, 1990; Zamel, 1983).

A number of corpus-based studies have confirmed the critiques against traditional LA
instruction by showing issues advanced learners have had in employing this vocabulary in
their writing. Several Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis (CIA) studies (Chen, 2006; Milton
and Tsang, 1993; Tankó, 2004) have found evidence of overuse by second language writers
from a variety of language backgrounds. In addition, there has been evidence of underuse
by L2 writers, as seen in Altenberg and Tapper’s (1998) study of L1 Swedish ESL students.
Still other studies (Granger & Tyson, 1996; Lei, 2012) find that L2 writers will overuse some
linking adverbials while underusing others. Both the L1 French writers in Granger and
Tyson’s (1996) study and the Chinese doctoral students in Lei’s (2012) study overused
additive LAs while underusing contrastive and causal LAs.

According to each of the above-mentioned studies, the overuse or underuse of LAs was
caused by misuse, either semantic or stylistic. Both the Milton and Tsang (1993) and
Granger and Tyson (1996) studies attribute some of the overuse of LAs in their learner
corpora to semantic misuse, which occurs when students choose the wrong LA to connect
ideas. In Milton and Tsang (1993), the authors found that students often misused moreover
and therefore. In the example of moreover, the writer used the additive LA to connect two
sentences that contrast each other. In the examples of therefore, the misuses were caused
by faulty logic. Granger and Tyson (1996) noted that the second language writers in their
corpus tended to misuse LAs because of transfer from their native language, French. The
subjects used several English LAs as they would their equivalents in French, unaware of the
differences between them. It must be noted that both of these studies do not provide any
quantitative analysis as to the full extent of misuse.

There has also been evidence that second language writers misuse LAs stylistically by
overusing more colloquial LAs in academic writing while underusing formal LAs. Granger and
Tyson (1996) found that their L1 French writers used more colloquial LAs such as anyway
and so often in their writing and greatly underused more academically appropriate ones
such as therefore, thus, and however. The authors attribute these issues to the fact that,
“throughout school and university, relatively little emphasis is put on matters of style”
(Granger and Tyson, 1996, p. 23). The L1 Swedish writers in Altenberg and Tapper’s (1998)
study underused LAs that are more academically appropriate. The authors state that, “it is
significant that with the exception of though all the underused conjuncts belong to the
formal registers” (p. 87). They account for these results by pointing to the students’ lack of
familiarity with formal English LAs. In her study, Chen (2006) found that besides was the
sixth most frequently used LA by her subjects, while it was never used by the professional
writers in her control corpus. Similarly, the doctoral students in Lei (2012) overused
besides, as well as the informal LA actually, in their writing. While these studies do provide
evidence of stylistic misuse by second language writers, they fall short in that they provide
only limited amounts of data. Their pedagogical recommendations are also rather limited,
only stating that students need to be made aware of stylistic restrictions on LAs.

Corpus studies in the use of LAs have been very helpful by bringing to light the problems
second language writers have with this vocabulary. Unfortunately, few studies have
attempted to investigate possible solutions to these problems. To the author’s knowledge,
there has been only one study investigating the effect of DDL on the acquisition of LAs:
Cresswell (2004). In this study, groups of students investigated sets of concordances for
specific subgroups of LAs and presented their results to the rest of the class. Half of the
groups used an inductive approach to their investigation while half used a deductive one.
Regardless of approach, all students acquired some declarative knowledge of the subgroup
they studied, although the students using the inductive approach had an overall deeper
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understanding. In order to see if there was any effect on student writing, the author
compared LA usage in essays written by the DDL class and another writing class where no
corpus based instruction took place. He compared correct usage, quantity, and variety of
this vocabulary and found that DDL had little observable positive effect. One major
limitation of this study is that it focuses mainly on receptive knowledge observed in student
presentations. LA use in writing was investigated, but it was limited to a very small set of
LAs. The present study will build upon the previous one by investigating the effect of DDL
techniques, specifically concordance line and short context reading and direct corpus
consultation, on the acquisition of a wider range of LAs. In doing so, it will attempt to
determine if these techniques can be more effective in helping students properly employ
this vocabulary in their writing, both in terms of meaning and register, than more traditional
approaches.

METHODS

Participants

The subjects in the present study were enrolled in two sections of the second unit of a
freshman composition course designed for L2 speakers at a public university in the
southeastern United States. The pedagogical focus of the course was academic writing,
including an understanding of formal argumentation and research practices. Section 1, the
test group, consisted of 15 students, while Section 2, the control group, consisted of 12
students. All students had scores meeting the university’s TOEFL requirement (500 on the
paper-based or its equivalent score on the computer-based or the internet version) and
were matriculated students. Therefore, their general English level was intermediate or
above, suitable for DDL. The predominant native language of the students was Chinese, but
other languages included Arabic, Korean, and Lithuanian.

Materials

The two corpora used for instruction were the Corpus of Contemporary American English
(COCA) (Davies, 2008) and the Michigan Corpus of Upper-Level Student Papers (MICUSP)
(2009). The COCA is a 425 million-word collection of texts taken from spoken conversation
on TV and radio, fiction, popular magazines, newspapers, and academic journals compiled
since 1990. Because the focus of the course is academic prose, the use of the COCA was
predominantly limited to the academic subsection of the corpus. This subsection of the
COCA contains 79 million words taken from nearly 100 different academic journals covering
a wide range of topics published from 1990 to 2009. The activities focusing on differences
between registers made use of the other sections as well. The benefits of using COCA are its
wide coverage, amount of data, and amount of search and display options. MICUSP is a
collection of 830 papers (around 2.6 million words) written by students in upper-level
courses across four academic divisions (Humanities and Arts, Social Sciences, Biological and
Health Sciences, and Physical Sciences). The papers were written by undergraduate
students in their final year and graduate students and all received an A grade. This corpus
was chosen by the investigator for its particular relevance to the students. Another positive
factor was the display of results, which consisted of short contexts of about two to four
sentences instead of simply concordance lines. Another benefit to MICUSP was its ease of
use.

Procedures

Section 1 was the test group with Section 2 being the control group (this is how they will be
labeled in tables). Both sections covered the same content in terms of readings, writing
topics, and assignments. The only difference between the two sections was the instruction
on LAs. Section 1 received 30 to 45 minutes per week of DDL activities and instruction
focusing on LAs. This amounted to about 20 to 30 percent of total class time. In addition,
students in the test group were assigned homework involving the use of corpora. Section 2
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received an equal amount of instruction time focusing on LAs, as well as other cohesive
devices; however, the instruction they received followed more traditional approaches. For
example, in one activity students were given a list of LAs according to semantic type and
then would have to choose the correct ones to complete sentences in a gap-filling activity.

The DDL activities could be divided into two types, concordance line and short context
reading and direct corpus consultation. The former focused on the meanings of individual
LAs, while the latter focused on differences in use between spoken and written registers. For
concordance line and short context reading activities, students would search the corpus for
given lists of target LAs and read the Key Word in Context (KWIC) concordance line or short
context (usually two or four sentences) results. Based on their reading, they would then
either write a definition for each LA or put it in the correct semantic category or
subcategory. Students could also be given sets of concordance lines or short contexts for
certain LAs on class handouts. Again, they would write a definition or classify the target
linking adverbials according to semantic category or subcategory. Once all students finished
the activity, the entire class would discuss the results. If an activity was done as homework,
the following class would begin with the discussion of results. Follow-up activities included
gap filling, sentence creation, or sentence combining exercises. For the direct corpus
consultation exercises, students would search the COCA for the frequency of occurrences
(per million words) for semantically similar pairs of LAs. Based on the results, students
would decide which LA in each pair is “more academic” and should be used in their writing.
Again, these activities were followed by whole class discussions of results and follow-up
activities. The most common one was a replacement activity in which students removed
register inappropriate LAs from a text and replaced them with more appropriate ones.

Several additional points must be made as to the activities in the classroom. First, all DDL
activities were designed to involve a great deal of group work with students usually working
on corpus activities in groups of two or three. This design was based on ideas from Gavoli
and Aston (2001), who claim that, “discussing their findings may also raise learners’
awareness of broader lexical, grammatical, and textual issues” (p. 242). Second, the
activities were inductive and deductive: some sessions began with the instructor describing
the target LAs to the students and directing them to apply this information to new
examples, while during other sessions students reached conclusions based on their corpus
investigation and discussed them with the class. This was done to ensure that all students,
regardless of preferred learning style, benefited from the activities and because it was
sometimes necessary to give students some hints as to the focus of investigation.

The corpus instruction was organized in two parts. The first section lasted the first four
weeks of class and introduced students to corpus work in general and the corpora being
used. They were shown the multiple functions of the corpora, what type of information each
would present them, and how to use the information to make generalizations about
academic vocabulary. The activities at this point were designed to get the students
comfortable with using the corpus on their own and give them practice in the corpus
methods they would later use. The second section lasted five weeks and focused on LAs.
The total instruction time on this vocabulary was between 2.5 and 3.75 hours. In this time
students were introduced to each semantic type and subtype (following the framework of
Liu, 2008) of LAs. The main topics of instruction were semantic differences and register
differences, but other topics included grammar and when to avoid using LAs. The selection
of specific LAs was based on a study by Liu (2008) in which he found frequencies for LAs
across different registers. Those that occurred over 50 times per million words or were the
most frequent in the semantic subtype in the academic register were included. In total,
there were 39 (11 additive, 11 adversative, 8 causal, 9 sequential). In class activities, the
most frequent LAs of each category were the first to be discussed and were used as frames
for the others.

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Instruments

The instruments in this study were two essays written by the students as a normal part of
the course. The first essay was a rhetorical analysis in which students evaluated an essay
from the textbook and defended their evaluation. Because instruction and work on this
essay occurred before LA instruction, it was the pre-treatment essay. In the second essay,
students were required to take a position on a current topic of debate and defend it.
Because instruction and work on this essay occurred simultaneously with the LA instruction,
it was the post-treatment essay. The required length for both essays was over 1,000 words,
but the second essay was on average around 100 words longer.

Total type and token counts for the LAs in each essay were calculated, followed by
proportions of correct usage and proportions of academic tokens. “Academic” tokens were
those that were part of the vocabulary covered in the course or those that occurred over 50
times per million words in the academic section of Liu’s (2008) analysis. The proportions of
both correct usage and academic LA tokens in the students’ essays were averaged and
compared across groups (same essay, different group) and across essays (same group,
different essay).

RESULTS

Once all participants’ essays were collected, the LAs in each were counted according to
token and type. These counts were used to calculate total type and token counts in each
essay and in the entire group. Because each essay differed in total token count, the raw LA
type and token counts for each essay were calculated according to frequency per thousand
words. Table 1 and Table 2 present both the total types and tokens per group and the
average per thousand words frequencies in each group for each essay. Before presenting
these results, two things should be noted. First, the test group wrote, on average, longer
essays than their counterparts in the control group both before and following treatment.
This is the reason that totals, in some cases, might be higher for one group while the
average is not. Second, while a comparison of the range and frequency of LA usage
between students receiving DDL instruction, those receiving traditional instruction, and
native writers would be beneficial, that is not the purpose of the present study. These
statistics, however, will be helpful in the discussion of what, if any, changes in correct
semantic usage or register-appropriate usage are observed following instruction.

Table 1
Total and Average Linking Adverbial Types (per thousand words)

Pre-Treatment Essay Post-Treatment Essay
Total Average Total Average
Test 49 7.27 (4.57) 41 6.84 (3.24)
Control 46 8.60 (4.23) 50 8.40 (3.65)

Table 2
Total and Average Linking Adverbial Tokens (per thousand words)

Pre-Treatment Essay Post-Treatment Essay
Total Average Total Average
Test 170 10.04 (6.43) 204 11.60 (4.19)
Control 131 10.38 (5.48) 155 11.43 (5.20)

In their pre-treatment essays, both groups used LAs similarly, both in range of usage and
frequency of usage, as can be seen in both the total counts and average per thousand
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words frequencies. Following treatment, the test group reduced the amount of different LA
types they employed, while the control group slightly increased their range. Both groups’
average type frequencies fell, although these changes were slight. There was an increase in
the total amount of LA tokens used by both groups following treatment, which resulted in
slightly higher averages in the post-treatment essay.

In order to address Research Question 1, once all LAs in the student essays were identified,
they were analyzed to determine if they were used correctly semantically. In other words,
was each one used to indicate the correct semantic relationship between the sections of text
it was connecting? The proportion of correctly used LAs in each student’s essay was then
calculated and averaged with the other essays in the group. The results are presented in
Table 3.

Table 3
Average Proportions of Correct Usage

Pre-Treatment Essay Post-Treatment Essay
Test 79.64% (18.16) 91.60% (6.56)
Control 74.41% (15.76) 78.95% (10.16)

Both groups correctly used LAs at a fairly high rate in the pre-treatment essays. The control
group had an average correct usage proportion of 74.41% (SD = 15.76) in the pre-
treatment essay. The test group’s average before treatment was slightly higher, at 79.64%
(SD = 18.16). The range of proportions in the two groups was also similar, with lowest
proportion at 40% (one student in each group) and the highest proportion at 100% (one
student in the control, five in the test). Following treatment, both groups showed
improvement; however, the test group’s was greater. The control group’s average correct
usage proportion rose slightly to 78.95% (SD = 10.16) in their post-treatment essays, while
the test group’s rose to 91.60% (SD = 6.56). The range of proportions following treatment
was smaller in both groups, although the lowest proportion in the test group was much
higher (81%) than the one in the control (60%). Looking at individual improvements, six
students in the control group improved, two regressed, and four stayed the same. In the
test group, all ten students who did not have 100% in the pre-treatment essay showed
improvement. Out of the five who had a correct usage proportion of 100% prior to DDL
instruction, four maintained their 100% rate.

In order to determine if the difference in improvement was significant, an analysis of
covariance (ANCOVA), which treated the pre-treatment proportions as the covariate, was
calculated. The results of the ANCOVA, presented in Table 4, indicate that the difference in
improvement between the two groups was statistically significant (F [1,24] = 20.213,
p<.001, η 2=.457). The effect of instruction was also quite large, accounting for 45.7% of
p
the variance in subject scores. Thus, reading concordance lines and short contexts produced
significantly higher improvements than traditional classroom instruction when it comes to
correct semantic usage of LAs.

Table 4
Adjusted Post-Treatment Proportions of Correct Usage

Adjusted Post-Treatment df F P η 2
p
Means
Test 90.80% 1 20.213 <.001 .457
Control 79.90%

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For Research Question 2, all extracted LAs, used correctly or incorrectly, were divided into
academic and non-academic groups. The academic group consisted of LAs taught in the
course or that occurred over 50 times per million words in the academic section of Liu’s
(2008) analysis. The proportion of academic LA tokens in each student’s essay was then
calculated and averaged with the other essays in the group. The averages are presented in
Table 5. These averages were also used to calculate an ANCOVA, the results of which are
presented in Table 6.

Table 5
Average Proportion of Academic LA Tokens

Pre-Treatment Essay Post-Treatment Essay
Test 72.29% (19.14) 92.53% (9.95)
Control 75.73% (15.67) 70.33% (16.60)

Table 6
Adjusted Post-Treatment Proportions of Academic LA Tokens

Adjusted Post-Treatment Means df F p η 2
p
Test 92.90% 1 20.554 <.001 .461
Control 69.90%

Before treatment, both groups used similar proportions of academic tokens. The average
proportion for the control group was 75.73% (SD = 15.67) and was 72.29% (SD = 19.14)
for the test group. In both groups, only one student had a proportion of 100% and only one
student had a proportion under 50%. Following treatment, the control group’s average
proportion of academic tokens decreased, falling slightly to 70.33% (SD = 16.60). The test
subjects, on the other hand, greatly increased the proportion of academic tokens they used,
increasing their average to 92.53% (SD = 9.95) in the post-treatment essay. In the control
group, there was still one student with a proportion under 50%, while the lowest in the test
group was 63%. In terms of individual improvement, fourteen of the fifteen students in the
test group improved their individual proportions; in contrast, only five of the twelve in the
control group did the same and another five students’ proportions decreased. The results of
the ANCOVA, controlling for pre-treatment variance, reveals that the changes in the
proportions of academic tokens in the test and control groups were significantly different (F
[1,24] =20.554, p <.001, η 2 =.461). The effect size of instruction was also rather high,
p
accounting for 46.1% of the variance. Based on all of these results, direct corpus
consultation helped students gain a higher level of understanding in the differences between
academic and non-academic LAs, an understanding the students were able to apply to their
own writing.

DISCUSSION

The above results indicate some positive value of these particular DDL techniques in the
instruction of LAs. Students from each group were already able to correctly employ LAs
fairly well before treatment, as was evidenced in their moderately high levels of correct
semantic usage. Following treatment, both groups made improvements in this ability,
although the test group’s improvement was significantly greater than the control’s.
Furthermore, this improvement was seen across the group, as more students in the test
group made improvements than did in the control group and less of them recorded lower
proportions following treatment. These findings suggest the potential value of concordance
line and short context reading. That is, through examining multiple examples from a corpus,
the students in the test group were encouraged to engage in deep processing as they
attempted to determine the meaning of these cohesive devices. This helped students not
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only acquire better productive knowledge of the LAs they already knew, but also helped
them acquire new LAs taught in the course. For example, seven new LAs taught using the
corpus were used in the post-treatment essays by the test group, with all of them being
used correctly. It is interesting to note that two of these, otherwise and causal then,
represent a subcategory of LAs, conditional causal, that did not appear in either the test
group’s pre-treatment essays or in either of the control groups essays.

These results both confirm and expand on previous studies on DDL and vocabulary
acquisition, specifically Kaur and Hegelheimer (2005) and Cresswell (2004). The students in
the test group were better able to use the target vocabulary correctly following treatment, a
result also observed by Kaur and Hegelheimer (2005). Like the students receiving DDL
instruction in Cresswell (2004), the students in the test group increased their knowledge of
LAs. However, because the current study focused on productive use of LAs and examined a
wider range of them in student writing, a much more definite picture of DDL’s positive effect
on the acquisition and use of this vocabulary can be seen.

Before treatment, most students in both groups had some register awareness with regard to
LA usage in academic writing. Nevertheless, they were still using too many informal LAs, as
can be seen in the average proportions for each group being around 75%. Following DDL
instruction, the average proportion of academic LA tokens used by the subjects in the test
group increased dramatically as all but one student increased their individual proportion.
Only five students receiving more traditional LA instruction increased their individual
proportions and five recorded lower ones, leading to a slight decrease in the average
proportion for the control group. The statistically significant difference between the changes
in average proportion, combined with a large effect size, provides evidence for the
effectiveness of direct corpus consultation in the teaching of register awareness.

Further evidence can be seen by looking at the changes in LA types occurring pre- and post-
treatment. Fourteen of the eighteen LA types that occur in the pre-treatment essays of the
test group but do not appear in the post-treatment ones were informal. Out of the nine new
LA types appearing solely in the post-treatment essays for the test group, seven types were
from the formal register. This is in contrast to the control group, who used new informal and
formal LAs in the post-treatment essays at about the same rate. So, it appears students in
the test group replaced informal LAs with new formal ones they learned through using the
corpus while the control group continued using informal ones. The test group also replaced
informal LAs with semantically similar formal ones they already knew. For example, besides,
an overused informal LA in Chen (2006), fell in frequency by half, from .598 to .263 tokens
per thousand words from pre-treatment to post. Meanwhile, moreover, a more academically
appropriate near synonym, increased in usage from .355 to .842 tokens per thousand
words.

In several studies of stylistic misuse of LAs (Altenberg & Tapper, 1998; Chen, 2006;
Granger & Tyson, 1996), the researchers recommend that students be exposed to a wide
range of registers in order to become aware of the stylistic restrictions of some LAs. The
results from this study show that direct corpus consultation can do just that in a more
efficient manner than more traditional approaches. Through finding and comparing usage
information across registers in the corpus, the test group acquired a higher level of
understanding of the differences in formal and informal writing. They were able to see that
not all LAs are appropriate for academic writing and then put this knowledge into practice.
As they revised their essays and attempted to make them read more academic, students
stopped using less academically appropriate LAs and instead chose more academically
appropriate ones, some they already knew and some new ones learned through DDL
techniques.

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