Teaching Second Language Collocations via Concordancers: The Case of Deductive and Inductive Approaches

Over the past few decades, the use of the corpus-based approaches in second language (L2) teaching has received considerable attention among teachers and researchers. Drawing upon a corpus-based approach, this study aims to investigate the differential effects of the deductive and inductive cognitive approaches on the improvement of verb-adverb collocational knowledge in the context of classroom concordancing. Seventy-six participants were randomly assigned to deductive, inductive, and control groups. During two intensive 90-minute sessions, the experimental groups were given some receptive and productive tasks to do using the concordancer as a reference tool. While the collocational patterns for accomplishing the tasks were explicitly presented to the deductive group, the inductive group was required to work out the underlying patterns using concordance lines. The analysis of the data gathered from receptive (multiple-choice) and productive (sentence-completion and sentence writing) collocation pretest and post-test revealed that concordancing had significant effects on the improvement of L2 collocational knowledge. While both the deductive and inductive groups showed similar gains in receptive knowledge of collocations, the inductive approach was found to be more effective in developing productive knowledge. Overall, the students had positive views of concordancing. The findings have pedagogical implications for L2 teachers and curriculum designers