An Empirical Study on Concordance-based English Collocation Teaching

The wide use of computer has led to the reform in modern English teaching approach. Computer concordance, a new multicontext presentation mode, provides a new way for collocation teaching. This study explores if there is any difference between on-line concordancer teaching approach, concordance-based explicit teaching approach and traditional deductive approach on college students' collocation use and retention. The findings provide empirical support for concordance-based explicit teaching approach's superiority to other approaches in promoting the immediate use and long-term retention of target collocations, which is measured by immediate and delayed test. Teachers are well-advised to pick up the typical concordance lines deliberately, annotate difficult words when necessary before handing out worksheets to learners.