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Concordance-Based Data-Driven Learning Activities and Learning English Phrasal Verbs in EFL Classrooms

Paper · 2014 · Mohammad Reza Anani Sarab and Amir Kardoust

Summary

The study asks whether corpus-based data-driven learning (DDL) can work in ordinary EFL classrooms that lack computers and teachers trained in corpus linguistics. The target was English phrasal verbs, which learners find hard because their meanings are often opaque and their structure differs from the learners' first language. Following Boulton's proposal, the authors replaced hands-on concordancer use with paper-based DDL: teacher-prepared worksheets built from concordance lines. A quasi-experimental pretest–posttest control group design compared lower-intermediate learners using these worksheets with a group working from dictionary entries, which gave definitions and two example sentences. The treatment lasted a full semester, much longer than Boulton's single-session study. On both an immediate and a delayed posttest, the DDL group improved more than the dictionary group, although the dictionary group also made clear gains. The authors conclude that printed concordance tasks can bring inductive, learner-driven vocabulary study to low-resource classrooms, even with lower-level learners and minimal training. They suggest such tasks can also prepare learners for later use of a real concordancer.

Key points

  • Design: quasi-experimental pretest–posttest control group study. The two conditions were paper-based DDL with concordance lines and dictionary-entry activities with definitions and two examples. Both groups answered multiple-choice phrasal verb items.
  • Learners and duration: lower-intermediate learners with very little DDL training. The treatment ran for one complete semester, unlike Boulton's (2010) study, which used part of a single 90-minute session.
  • Results: the DDL group outperformed the dictionary group on both the immediate and the delayed posttest. The dictionary group still improved substantially.
  • Rationale: DDL replaces the deductive "three Ps" with the inductive "three Is" (Illustration, Interaction, Induction). Johns (1991) describes the same cycle as observation, classification and generalization.
  • Background: Boulton's (2009) survey of 39 empirical DDL studies found that most measured learner perceptions rather than learning outcomes. Earlier paper-based studies include Allan (2006), Tian (2005) and Koosha & Jafarpoor (2006, 200 participants).

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Frozen printed snapshots instead of a live tool. Printed concordance sheets fix the evidence in advance, so every learner sees the same curated lines and can revisit them later, unlike fleeting web search results. This makes the input controlled and reproducible.
  • I2. Learning a sense by observing, classifying and generalizing. Learners infer what a phrasal verb means by grouping many authentic contexts rather than reading one definition. This is a transparent, explainable route from instances to a rule.
  • I3. A delayed posttest alongside the immediate one. Testing again after some time shows whether gains last rather than fading quickly.
  • I4. Lookup can inflate scores without processing. Dictionary users often fixed their test answers right after reading a definition, before finishing the planned activities. Their confidence rose without deep engagement with the meaning.
  • I5. Treating particle verbs as opaque units needing contextual evidence. The paper's starting premise is that phrasal verb meaning cannot be built compositionally from verb plus particle.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (learn): build fixed KWIC-style evaluation sheets for hard constructions such as phrasal verbs, so parser and frame changes are always judged on identical frozen evidence.
  • I2 (world): induce phrasal-verb senses and their verb classes by clustering concordance contexts by argument types, and keep the clusters as inspectable evidence for each lexicon entry.
  • I3 (learn): re-run earlier targeted test sets after later training rounds or new repair rules, to catch silent regressions on constructions that were already fixed.
  • I4 (answer): design school-course and QA tests whose answers cannot be copied from a single gloss, so that scores reflect actual reading of the text.
  • I5 (tree): check compound:prt versus prepositional attachment against concordance-style batches of real sentences, since misreading the particle as a preposition breaks every later stage.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓Shahid Beheshti UniversityTehran · Iran4 works · 9 citations

📚 Shelves 4 Arts and Humanities · 9,296 works Language and Linguistics · 9,206 works Psychology · 798 works Developmental and Educational Psychology · 260 works

🧭 Topics 3 English · 1,373 works Idioms & multiword expressions · 155 works Grammatical error correction & learner language · 80 works

Cite

Cite as Mohammad Reza Anani Sarab and Amir Kardoust. 2014. Concordance-Based Data-Driven Learning Activities and Learning English Phrasal Verbs in EFL Classrooms. Issues in Language Teaching 3.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{sarab2014concordance,
  title = {{Concordance-Based Data-Driven Learning Activities and Learning English Phrasal Verbs in EFL Classrooms}},
  author = {Mohammad Reza Anani Sarab and Amir Kardoust},
  booktitle = {Issues in Language Teaching 3},
  year = {2014},
  url = {https://ilt.atu.ac.ir/article_1370_b6ba8c340f8443c8e5d755fa99de8427.pdf}
}

References

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