1. education
2. english as a second language

Computer Assisted Language Learning
Vol. 20, No. 2, April 2007, pp. 131 – 152
Online Synonym Materials and
Concordancing for EFL College Writing
Yuli Yeh, Hsien-Chin Liou* and Yi-Hsin Li
National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan
The phenomenon of overused adjectives by non-native speaking learners (NNS) has been
pinpointed by recent research. This study designed five online units for increasing students’
awareness of underused specific adjectives for EFL college writing. Five units were developed for
five identified overused adjectives: important, beautiful, hard, deep, and big. In each unit, data-driven
learning materials, incorporating a bilingual collocation concordancer TANGO, first had learners
engaged in distinguishing synonymous adjectives from concordance lines as their first task. Then
three exercises for practise followed as a second task. Nineteen English majors in a college freshman
writing class participated in the study. The assessment measures included three tests, two in-class
writing tasks, and questionnaires. The findings indicate that, in addition to improvement in the
immediate posttest, students’ word knowledge for synonym use was still retained as measured two
months later in the delayed posttest. Moreover, in the post-instruction writing task, students
avoided using general adjectives, tried to apply more specific items, and thus improved their overall
writing quality. As for students’ attitude toward the learning units, over half reported that inductive
learning was beneficial although they still found it difficult to verbalize differences among
semantically similar words. TANGO was also considered a useful tool for learning synonyms and
their collocates.
For effective and successful communication in writing, second language learners are
instructed to use specific words and to avoid using general terms or overused
modifiers. A case study by Granger and Tribble (1998) comparing the corpora of
French learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) and of native speakers (NS)
explicitly pointed out the prominent phenomenon of overused adjectives by nonnative learners (NNS). The EFL learners were found to be very dependent on
superordinates such as real, important, and different throughout their text, an
*Corresponding author. ROC Department of Foreign Languages and Literature, National Tsing
Hua University, Taiwan. Email: hcliu@mx.nthu.edu.tw
ISSN 0958-8221 (print)/ISSN 1744-3210 (online)/07/020131–22
Ó 2007 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/09588220701331451
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indication of lexical poverty in most of the learner output. The adjectives learners
overuse is what Ham and Rundell (1994, p. 178) address as default terms, a factor
which makes a writing task ineffective. The finding provides pedagogical implications
for EFL teaching and learning—that learners should be encouraged to employ words
with a higher degree of specificity for successful communication.
To solve the above-mentioned problem, the use of concordancing for data-driven
learning (DDL) could be an alternative to help learners. DDL presents abundant
examples to expose learners to authentic language and to let them discover rules
from contextual clues in corpus evidence (Johns & King, 1991). Furthermore,
presenting concordance data to learners can help learners successfully discriminate among semantically similar items and attend to the collocation 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 more specific synonymous alternatives, instead of overused adjectives, for
better writing.
Vocabulary and Writing
The importance of word selection for writing has been recognized by scholars such as
Johnson (2000), who stresses that a writer has to use precise diction to express the
intended messages. Studies have shown that vocabulary improvement and lexical
selection in writing tasks are also emphasized by evaluators of student writing (e.g.
Engber, 1995; Santos, 1988). To illustrate, Engber (1995) found that the diversity of
lexical choices and the correctness of lexical forms had a significant effect on reader
judgment of the overall quality of essays written by L2 writers of intermediate to highintermediate proficiency. Likewise, Santos (1988) reported a study investigating the
reaction of 178 professors to two compositions written by a Chinese student and a
Korean student. One of the major findings of research is that lexical errors are
considered the most serious problem in learner output. Taking into consideration the
frustration that learners experience when they spend so much time searching for
appropriate lexical items but still have difficulty expressing themselves precisely,
Santos (1988) suggested that lessons on vocabulary building and lexical selection be
incorporated into ESL writing courses. These vocabulary lessons should be designed
with emphasis on the importance of lexical choice and elicitation or presentation of
synonymous expressions.
Researchers also advocate applying the results of corpus analyses to pedagogy.
Flowerdew (2001) has suggested that the findings from these comparative studies of
native and non-native corpora be utilized in designing materials to address students’
needs and deficiencies, as in the case of the compilation of dictionaries for
NNS. Instead of giving form-focused instruction based on language teachers’
intuition, Granger and Tribble (1998) propose the utilization of NNS learner data for
a more systematic account of learner difficulties. Tschichold (2003) has also
explicitly recommended that computer assisted language learning (CALL) activities
be adapted to help learners actively practice alternative words or expressions for
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overused items. Such vocabulary enhancement activities would better serve to
strengthen learners’ knowledge of the target adjectives when the presentation of the
teaching materials is based on analyses of actual learner corpora, instead of on teacher
intuition.
Learner Corpus Evidence about Word Use Problems
The corpora stored in a computer allow researchers, teachers and students to exploit
a huge amount of authentic data in their study of language, instead of simply
depending on their intuitions (e.g. Chambers, 2005; Horst, Cobb, & Nicolae, 2005).
Among various types of corpora, learner corpus research may provide more insights
into learners’ weaknesses. Quite a few studies have been carried out to probe into the
differences between learner corpora and native English-speaker corpora so as to offer
insights to EFL teachers. For instance, Ringbom (1998) found that the verb ‘‘think’’
occurred more frequently in the non-native learner corpora than in the nativespeaker corpora. Learners were also found to use certain other vocabulary items of
high generality, such as people and things, with a higher frequency than native
speakers did.
The use of adjectives, in particular, was investigated by Granger and Tribble
(1998) through a comparison between the Louvain corpus (227,964 words, writing
by French learners of English) and a core subset of the British National Corpus
(1,080,072 words). The study showed that advanced French learners of English used
such adjectives as real, different, important, longer and true more frequently than
proficient NS writers. It revealed that learners tended to be over-reliant on
superordinate adjectives such as important in their academic writing, while excluding
words with higher degrees of specificity, such as critical/crucial/major/serious/significant/
vital. Another contrastive study specifically focusing on Chinese learners of English
was conducted by Gui and Yang (2002). They developed a Chinese Learner English
Corpus (CLEC), which comprised 1,185,977 words from compositions of
intermediate to advanced learners, and compared CLEC with other corpora of
English speakers. The comparison of big, great, and large used in CLEC and the
Freiburg Lancaster – Oslo/Bergen Corpus (the Freiburg update of the Lancaster –
Oslo/Bergen Corpusand with one million words of edited written British English)
revealed that Chinese learners used great more frequently. Gui and Yang (2002) point
out that Chinese learners regarded great as a general intensifier applicable to any
situation. Moreover, the misuse of big and large indicated that learners were still not
familiar with their collocates.
Corpus-based Approaches for Vocabulary Learning
Traditional approaches to using a print dictionary, glosses, or lists of synonyms may
not provide adequate help to L2 learners. The study by Harvey and Yuill (1997) gives
a detailed account of the role Collins COBUILD English Language Dictionary
(CCELD) (1987) played in the completion of written tasks by EFL learners.
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The learners were required to identify and distinguish various types of information
about a word they could look up in the dictionary. Of the look-ups, synonym
searching was among the most frequent activities. However, 36.1% of synonym
searches were reported to be unsuccessful. In almost all these unsuccessful cases, the
users indicated that the dictionary entry did not give them the information they
needed in order to use the synonyms. Although CCELD offers an extra column for
main source synonyms, it fails to present explicitly with the synonyms their register,
connotation, difference of nuance, or collocations, and contextual clues that will
make learners confidently choose an appropriate synonym for use from the list.
Harvey and Yuill conclude that providing synonyms in conjunction with their
collocational patterns and semantic features, and providing stylistic guidance rather
than implied equivalence alone, is essential. Corpus data with such information,
therefore, is a powerful alternative for vocabulary learning and teaching. Martin
(1984) examined vocabulary errors in university-level expository writing and
concluded that the teaching of vocabulary via glosses or lists of synonyms in the
target language could possibly lead to improper lexical choices, as learners might take
two synonyms as exactly interchangeable alternatives and ignore their subtle
differences. Therefore, learners should be guided to notice whether synonyms
behave identically in all contexts and to recognize the fine distinctions among
semantically related words. Teaching materials should offer learners chances to
compare and contrast new words so as to identify the nearest collocates and the
different situations in which each one occurs.
Concordance-derived materials provide such classroom opportunities to overcome
students’ difficulties in vocabulary use. A concordance shows the context of a
keyword or key phrase for user query, a process called concordancing. Hunston
(2002) modified a concordance-based activity to focus on the problem of the
underuse and overuse of vocabulary items in the target language. Learners were first
provided with concordance lines from a native-speaker corpus presenting adjectives
with higher specificity, such as serious, major or critical. Then, the general word, in this
case important, was removed and learners were asked to replace it with one of the
suggested alternatives. The vocabulary enhancement exercises aimed to help learners
increase their awareness of the words they tended to underuse.
Other studies have examined the effects of concordancing (learning through
computer key word search programs within a corpus) on various aspects of language
learning (e.g. Chambers, 2005; Chan & Liou, 2005; Horst et al., 2005). For instance,
Horst et al. combined the use of a concordance, a dictionary, a cloze-builder, a
hypertext, and a database with interactive self-quizzing features in several ESL
courses for academic English and evaluated the effects of those tools and activities on
150 students. Statistic analyses evidenced the learning gains from the tools, and the
contextual sentences provided support for vocabulary learning. To pinpoint how
corpus consultation can assist language learning, Chambers (2005) examined the
process of students’ consultation of corpora, including choice of search word(s),
analytical skills, problems encountered, and their evaluation of the activity. Although
she found that corpora consultation could complement foreign language learning in
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various educational contexts, limitations such as the small size of corpora and the lack
of learner training were also found.
Two studies specifically focusing on Taiwan EFL learners were undertaken by Lee
and Liou (2003), Yeh (2003), Sun and Wang (2003), and Chan and Liou (2005),
who investigated the feasibility of incorporating a web-based monolingual English
concordancer as an electronic referencing tool into traditional senior high or college
English classes for vocabulary learning. Forty-six second-year senior high school
students in an intact class were involved in the study of Lee and Liou (2003) and were
categorized into three groups of high, intermediate and low vocabulary levels. The
findings first indicate that students with lower vocabulary proficiency seemed to catch
up with students at the high vocabulary level after concordance learning. In other
words, concordancing has the potential for scaffolding weak learners to accelerate
their vocabulary acquisition. Moreover, students with inductive learning styles
benefited most from the concordancing learning experiences. Students’ attitudes
toward the use of concordancing was positive and they were willing to use the tool for
vocabulary learning in the future. Similar findings were reported in Yeh’s (2003)
study on 23 college learners focusing on the effects of self-selected concordances and
individual learning styles. The results indicate that concordancing-based vocabulary
learning does help with learners’ word use, particularly for learners who show an
inclination toward inductive learning.
Further, Sun and Wang (2003) and Chan and Liou (2005) explored the effects
of online interactive collocation exercises, with concordancers incorporated, in
EFL settings, since mastery of collocations (word combinations) has been claimed
to be an important aspect of learners’ vocabulary competence (e.g. Wray, 2002).
Sun and Wang (2003) randomly divided 81 senior high students into two groups.
The two groups used corresponding online exercise versions designed with either a
deductive or an inductive approach. Posttest results indicated that the overall the
inductive group showed significantly more improvement than the deductive group.
Easier collocations were learned more effectively when the inductive approach was
incorporated into concordancing. Chan and Liou (2005) investigated the use of
five web-based practice units, with an online Chinese – English bilingual
concordancer incorporated, for learning English verb – noun collocations. Thirtytwo college EFL students participated in the study. Results indicate that learners
made significant improvement on collocations immediately after the online
practice but regressed later. Yet, the final performance was still better than
students’ entry performance. Different verb – noun collocation types resulted in
different practice effects. Learners with different prior collocation knowledge were
also found to perform differently as far as the practice effects were concerned.
Both the online instructional units and the concordancer were acceptable to most
participants.
It seems that concordancing-based CALL exercises could be beneficial for
English learning, particularly when aspects of vocabulary or collocations are
included. Yet few previous studies have examined the impact of concordancing on
the learning of synonymous adjectives, despite the fact that, according to learner
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corpus analysis, some adjectives tend to be overused and thus weaken students
writing.
The Current Study
Research on concordancing suggests that learning synonyms, through a learner’s
active analysis of corpus data, may help learners clarify differences in meaning and
thus enhance vocabulary competence. Furthermore, words with apparent similarity in
L1 meaning should be taught with their typical collocates in context (Harvey & Yuill,
1997; Partington, 1998). Therefore, it may be beneficial to design concordance-based
materials with the aim of increasing learners’ awareness of collocations of nearsynonyms for appropriate word use. Following principles for designing concordancebased exercises (Hunston, 2002), our study has analyzed NNS learner data in
identifying learning difficulties and developed online materials focusing on five
overused adjectives by EFL learners. The current study seeks to address four research
questions:
1. Are the designed online learning units effective for students’ learning of synonymous adjectives in a controlled test?
2. Can the online materials improve students’ use of synonymous adjectives in
writing?
3. How do students perform in inducing patterns or finding out the differences
among synonymous words when they use a bilingual concordancer?
4. What is students’ feedback on the online materials?
A one-group pretest – posttest design was adopted to address the issue under
investigation. An intact class of 19 college freshman English majors from a public
university in Taiwan participated in the study. The participants took freshman writing
as a required course, having two 50-minute class periods per week. Most of the
students had received formal instruction about English for six years during their
junior and senior high school years. Due to the more authoritative roles of teachers in
Chinese culture and the time constraints placed upon the students because of the
college entrance exam, most participants were more accustomed to deductive
learning in which teachers presented rules in order to save time. Most learners would
be challenged in an environment which required the cognitive skill of induction.
Two types of instruments, tests and questionnaires, were used in the study to
collect data for the research questions. A test with 15 translation and 15 gap-filling
items, equally distributed to five sets of synonyms—important, beautiful, hard, deep,
and big was designed. The 30 items in the pretest, posttest, and delayed posttest were
identical but sequenced differently in each of the tests. A background questionnaire
(with 25 items) was designed to obtain information about students’ background and
their preference for learning at the outset of the study. An evaluation questionnaire of
21 items examined students’ perception of the online practice after the experiment
period.
Synonym Units and Concordance for Writing
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Development of the Online Synonym Materials for the Study
Since insights derived from the analysis of learner corpora can provide a basis for
reducing learners’ overuse of adjectives (Granger & Tribble, 1998), the present study
initiated a comparison between a non-native speaker (NNS) corpus of EFL learners in
Taiwan and a 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 in a public university. The NS data for
contrastive analysis is LOCNESS (Louvain corpus of Native English essays, part of
the International Corpus of Learner English, http://www.fltr.ucl.ac.be/fltr/germ/etan/
cecl/cecl.html) corpus, consisting of 66,598 words of argumentative writing by British
students. In analyzing the NNS corpus, a self-developed error-coding scheme was
used to tag errors in the corpus, and word choice was found to be the most frequent
type of error. Further analysis was then carried out by comparing word frequencies in
the two corpora so as to identify overused adjectives by EFL students. The results
yielded from the comparison showed that learners tended to use five relatively general
words—important, beautiful, big, hard, and deep—with a frequency 20 times greater
than native speakers did. These words were thus chosen as the main focus of the
online synonym units to help reduce the phenomenon of overuse.
Further steps were taken in selecting the synonymous adjectives to be included as
the content of the units. First, we selected synonymous words for the five general
adjectives from WordNet because it provided detailed information for distinguishing
semantically similar words. WordNet (http://wordnet.princeton.edu/), an English
lexical database, is an online reference system developed by a group of linguists,
psycholinguists, and computer experts at Princeton University (Miller, Beckwith,
Fellbaum, Gross, & Miller, 1993). Next, we selected from the list of words we
identified from WordNet only those words with higher frequency in the British
National Corpus (BNC, a balanced synchronic text corpus containing 100 million
words with morphosyntactic annotation, http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/) to serve as
the target words for learning, since Tschichold (2003) stressed that learners needed to
be offered comprehensible alternative words or expressions for practice. Finally, to
facilitate successful learning with induction from concordance lines in TANGO, only
synonyms with sufficient instances provided by the Sinorama parallel corpus (from
which the concordancer, TANGO, was derived) were selected. Table 1 illustrates one
Table 1. An example of a general word with its synonyms in the online unit
Overused adjectives
Alternative words (synonyms)
Unit 1 important
Crucial
Influential
Significant
Serious
Vital
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example of one overused adjective important and its synonyms selected for the
exercises. In total, 25 words, five synonyms for each of the five overused terms,
formed the target word list to be covered in the online materials.
An Online Collocation Aid, TANGO
As mentioned above, encouraging learners to study collocational patterns of
semantically similar words should be effective for the teaching of synonyms.
Therefore, a collocation aid (Jian et al., 2004) was incorporated into the online
materials. This online aid, named TANGO, is a summarized version of a
Chinese – English bilingual concordancer with its output display focusing on specific
collocates for the query word a user types in (Wu et al., 2003). As shown in Figure 1,
TANGO is a web-based electronic referencing tool that can retrieve adjective – noun
(AN), verb – noun (VN), verb – preposition – noun (VPN) collocations from the
Sinorama Chinese-English parallel corpus, English Voice of America corpus, and
British National Corpus (for TANGO, see http://candle.cs.nthu.edu.tw, under the
NLP tools). Sinorama is a 40-million-word encyclopedic and bilingual electronic
textual database about facts of Taiwan; it was originally a collection of articles from an
official monthly magazine published in print over three decades, 1975 – 2002 (now
available online at: http://www.sinorama.com.tw/en). When a user types in a word,
TANGO can display relevant citations from the bilingual corpus Sinorama or the
monolingual corpus of VOA or BNC. The information presented will include
(a) clustered citations according to their collocates, (b) occurrence counts,
Figure 1. TANGO with the display of AN collocates
Synonym Units and Concordance for Writing
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(c) highlighted words and collocates, and (d) sorted citations listed according to the
frequency of the collocation. Therefore, when a user submits a query for the adjective
‘‘critical’’ from the Sinorama corpus, possible AN collocates are displayed as Figure 1
illustrates. One distinguishing advantage of the bilingual collocation aid from
Sinorama is that the highlighted collocates are shown with translated equivalents in
context. With Chinese counterparts available, users can view and examine easily
relevant instances that they need. Therefore, the collocation concordancer could be
beneficial to EFL learners by allowing them to induce rules or patterns by themselves.
In the practice units designed for synonyms, there were in total five learning units,
one for each of the five overused words identified, developed in the online environment CANDLE (http://candle.cs.nthu.edu.tw, use candle/candle to login, choose
synonyms under WriteBetter of the ‘Writing’ component). Each unit contained an
introduction page, a list of synonymous words with links to examples in TANGO, and
two tasks for induction and practice. To begin the induction task, learners read the
example sentences of each target synonym and made notes, on a notepad online, of
patterns they induced from the sentences. A summary page of the patterns a student
induced on how the synonyms can be appropriately used was then filled in (see
Appendix B for an example of a student summary). After the induction task, three
types of exercises were provided to reinforce the learning of synonymous adjectives:
substitution, gap-filling and translation (see Appendix A for an illustration). In the
substitution exercise, sentences with an overused adjective were presented for
students to replace the adjectives with more specific words. Gap-filling exercises
required learners to fill in acceptable alternative target words. Finally, learners’ input
for sentence-level Chinese – English translation items was checked by the program to
see if target adjective words appeared in the answers. The system provided feedback
on whether learners used the right word and presented an acceptable corresponding
English sentence for reinforcement. An online tracker program kept records of all
student responses to the exercises in the practice task, in addition to the notes they
took in the notepad and summary pages of patterns induced in the first induction
task.
The research procedures of the study included three stages. First, the background
questionnaire and the pretest were administered to all the participants. In addition,
they were asked to write with pen and paper an essay on the topic, ‘‘Why I chose to
study at Tsing Hua University’’ in about 30 minutes in class. For orientation, they
were also instructed on how to use the online learning units in a demonstration
provided by the researcher. Next, in the four-week treatment stage, students were
required to do the two tasks in class for 20 minutes and complete the rest after class
each week. The five units were completed within four weeks, one unit in each of the
first three weeks and two in the fourth week. Last, in the posttest stage, students took
the immediate posttest and filled out the evaluation questionnaire. The researcher
followed-up the evaluation questionnaire by interviewing students for general
comments about the units or for further clarification of their responses to the
evaluation questionnaire. Students took the delayed posttest eight weeks after the
immediate posttest. They also wrote a second composition about describing to an
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international student their college life at Tsing Hua University. In both of the
composition writing assignments, students were writing in class without access to
TANGO or other reference tools.
Results and Discussion
To answer the aforementioned research questions, the results of the tests, students’
use of adjectives in writing, their performance in induction, and their feedback on the
online units are presented below with discussion.
Learners’ Performance and Retention as Measured in Controlled Tests
First, how learners performed in the three controlled tests was investigated. Due to
the small sample size of the subjects (N ¼ 19), the statistic nonparametric method, the
Wilcoxon Signed Rank Sum (Keller & Warrack, 2002), was employed to analyze the
test results. Comparisons were made to see if there were significant differences
between (1) total scores of the pretest and the posttest (see Table 2) and (2) total
scores of the posttest and the delayed posttest. The total scores of the posttest (each
item worth 3 points, 90 in total for each test) was significantly higher than the pretest
(p ¼ 0.000 5 0.05), and no significant difference was found in the comparison of the
posttest and the delayed posttest (z ¼ 72.14, p 4 0.05). Hence, the positive
results indicate that students’ knowledge of synonyms had increased significantly in
the controlled tests. Additionally, students generally did not show much regression
in the delayed posttest, as indicated by the comparison with those of the posttest
scores. The answer to research question one, therefore, is that the online units did
enhance students’ learning of synonymous words and the effects can last over a
period of eight weeks, when learners were measured by test items.
Since the test was composed of questions equally distributed to the five sets of
adjectives, further analysis was conducted to examine how well students performed
with regard to each set of adjectives and which synonymous adjectives were more
effectively learned by the participants with the online design. Figure 2 shows the mean
scores for the five sets of synonyms at the time points of the pretest, the immediate
Table 2. Comparison of test scores between the pretest and the immediate posttest
N
Immediate Post – Pre
Negative ranks
Positive ranks
Ties
Total
0a
19b
0c
19
Mean
rank
Sum of
ranks
0.00
10.00
0.00
190.00
Z score
Asymp. sig.
(one-tailed)
70.318a
0.000*
*p 5 0.05
a. Immediate post5pre; b. immediate post4pre; c. immediate post ¼ pre.
Synonym Units and Concordance for Writing
141
Figure 2. Changes in the mean scores for the five sets of synonyms across three time points
posttest, and the delayed posttest. The results reveal 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 still the lowest. Yet students obtained the lowest
scores for big in the delayed posttest. Thus, it is inferred that students were able to
learn more about the synonyms of important but not as much for the synonyms of hard
after the online learning. Compared to synonyms for the other four adjectives, the
learning unit for the synonyms of big seems to have been less effective for students.
The change in patterns of the mean scores for the five word groups warrants further
research as the difference may be attributed to either item difficulty or the association
strength of the adjective – noun collocations presented.
The findings of improvement shown by the controlled tests echo results in studies
by Lee and Liou (2003) as well as Yeh (2003), indicating that positive effects of
concordancing on vocabulary learning were found. Similar to the studies of Sun and
Wang (2003) and Chan and Liou (2005) in which online concordancing practice
had been proven to be effective in the learning of collocations, the results of the
present study also indicate that learners’ knowledge of adjective – noun collocation is
enhanced as demonstrated by higher test scores.
Learners’ Changes of Word Use in Writing
In addition to improvement illustrated by test scores, we also investigated whether the
online materials designed would have an impact on learners’ writing. To analyze the
two student essays completed before and after the online learning, the ESL
Composition Profile (Jacobs et al., 1981) with analytic scales for the five components
in an essay (content, organization, vocabulary, language use, and mechanic with a
total score of 100) was adopted for rating the overall quality. Two raters (graduate
students in an MA-TEFL program) were involved in grading the essays and the
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scores were averaged with high inter-rater reliability (r ¼ 0.96). It was found that,
except for the two scores for language use and mechanics, scores for all the other
components, including that for the vocabulary category, and the total scores showed
significant differences between performance on the pretest and posttest essays (all p’s
in the designated categories were smaller than 0.05, see Table 3). This may suggest
that, combined with the teaching in the writing class, the online materials made an
impact on both overall writing quality and individual aspects of content, organization,
and vocabulary of essays written.
The vocabulary aspect of ESL Composition Profile covered the range of words,
word/idiom choice and usage, and word form mastery in writing. As this study
focused on adjectives, a further step was taken to examine more closely how students
actually used the target adjectives in writing. We first calculated both the total
number of words and the observed adjectives (the five overused adjectives, important,
beautiful, hard, deep, and big, and their specific synonyms, 30 target words) in the two
batches of essays, respectively. The first batch had a total of 3336 words with 17
general adjectives, while the second batch had 4578 words in total with 30 general
and 21 specific adjectives. Our next step was to normalize the length of essays, that is,
total words were divided by 100 to obtain the unit number for each composition.
Since not all students used the observed adjectives in both essays, we could only
include 10 students, out of the total 19, who employed the target items in both their
first and the second essays for our discussion. It seemed that some learners chose to
avoid using particular words or structures in their free writing. Another reason might
be that the topic constrained students’ use of certain words, for instance, the
nonoccurrence of the adjectives of hard and deep. Table 4 shows the general and
specific adjectives used by the 10 students.
There were four trends of students’ word use of specific or general adjectives in the
two batches of essays written at different time points. In the first trend ‘‘no change’’,
students S1 and S14 still used only general and overused items with no seeming
awareness of employing specific alternatives in their essays, after learning from the
online materials. They might either need more time to learn or the online materials
were not effective for these students. In the second trend, students S9, S16 and S18
did not improve in using general words but had tried to apply specific adjectives in
their writing. With more use of adjectives, more mistakes were found in the posttest
essays. We may call this a ‘‘restructuring’’ group whose interlanguage lexicon might
Table 3. Comparisons of the pretest and posttest essays regarding total scores and component
scores
Z
Asymp. Sig.
(one-tailed)
*p 5 0.05
Total
Content
Organization
Vocabulary
Language use
Mechanics
73.826
0.000*
73.836
0.000*
73.269
0.000*
71.832
0.034*
71.350
0.089
71.292
0.098
Synonym Units and Concordance for Writing
143
Table 4. Students’ adjective use in their pretest and posttest essays
Essays written in the pretest stage
Trend
General/Unit
Specific/Unit
Essays written in the posttest stage
General/Unit
1
S1
S14
1/1.44*
1/1.6
3/2.61
3/2.21
2
S9
S16
S18
1/1.66
3/1.68
1/1.99
2/2.06
6/2.13
1/1.57
3
S6
S8
2/1.83
1/1.09
1/1.37
2/2.38
4
S12
S15
S17
1/2.03
1/1.55
2/1.49
1/2.66
1/2.53
Specific/Unit
1/2.06
3/2.13
1/1.57
1/2.66
2/2.53
1/2.59
Note*: 1/1.44 means the Subject used one general adjective in his/her 144-word essays in the pretest
stage.
have been pushed up but have not yet reached the native-speaker’s norm (Bialystok &
Sharwood-Smith, 1985). During the restructuring process, more mistakes surface in
order to re-package what is learned into linguistic structures of a higher level. S6 and
S8, in the third category, had reduced the number of overused items, given the
consideration of word use frequencies and changes in essay length. They avoided the
use of general words in writing, but chose not to take risks in using specific words
which they might not have acquired yet. Finally, there were students who not only
avoided general adjectives but also learned to use words with a higher degree of
specificity, as S12, S15 and S17. This group might evidence the most obvious
learning effects of our online materials. Generally speaking, except for the ‘‘no
change’’ group in category 1, students made improvement in reducing their use of
general words and/or using more specific alternatives quantitatively. That is, in
addition to higher scores in controlled tests, all the participants wrote essays of better
quality after learning from the online materials. Since more target words surfaced in
the posttest essays in our analyses, we could say that the participants were pushing up
their diction use, though at idiosyncratic routes towards improvement. We can
postulate that, compared with their word use on the controlled tests, in a free writing
situation students paid much less attention to how words, particularly adjectives,
should be used appropriately. When they were engaged in a writing task, they had to
pay attention to many other aspects, such as generating ideas in a short time and
organizing the ideas coherently, in addition to word use.
Next, the actual use of target items in the two writing tasks completed in the pretest
and posttest periods were compared and are shown in Tables 4 and 5. In the first
batch, no specific adjective items had been used by students (see Table 5). Three
general words—important, beautiful and big—were used frequently in student pretest
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Y. Yeh et al.
Table 5. E Students’ adjective use in the pretest essays
General adjective use
Word
Instance
Occurrence
Important (3)
It’s important to . . . .
Stage
2
1
Beautiful(11)
university/Tsing Hua
Campus
scene/scenery
Place
Landscape
4
3
2
1
1
big(3)
Place
Tree
Tsing Hua
1
1
1
and posttest essays. Among these three general words used in the pretest essay,
beautiful, which was used to describe the campus or the view in the university, had the
most frequent occurrences. In the posttest essay, some students had tried to employ
alternatives such as lovely, instead of beautiful, to describe ‘‘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 the online units.
From the list in Table 6, it could also be inferred that the online units raised
students’ awareness of avoiding overused and general items and trying out other
specific words not taught in the online materials. To illustrate, with the concept of
beautiful, we found that students were able to employ more specific adjectives which
were not included in the online unit, for example, splendid/enchanting scene,
picturesque environment/view and wonderful campus. After the completion of the
learning units, students themselves were aware of looking for an appropriate substitute to express their ideas.
In sum, students’ increased knowledge of synonyms and their appropriate use of
target words was demonstrated in their free production. The comparison of the two
essays revealed that the phenomenon of overuse was reduced. It was also found that
the online synonym learning had raised learners’ awareness in avoiding overused
items when they attempted to use not only the target words learned through the
online units but also other specific adjectives not presented in the units.
Learners’ Induction during the Instructional Process
To examine what led to students’ improvement or non-improvement, process data
recorded in the online tracker program while the participants were working on the
exercises were examined. Students’ induction on the online summary page was
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Synonym Units and Concordance for Writing
Table 6. Students’ adjective use in the posttest essays
General
Word
Specific
Collocates
Important (4) V-ing is important
Quality
Thing
Reason
Beautiful (21) Campus
Scenery/scene
Place
Forest
Surroundings
Environment
Lake
Harmony
Occurrence Word
Tsing Hua
Field
Campus
Building
Occurrence
1
1
1
1
Crucial (3)*
Role
Decision
it is crucial to . . .
Significant (1)* Mark
1
1
1
1
10
4
2
1
1
1
1
1
Splendid (1)
Lovely (2)*
Scene
Campus
Scene
Campus
Lake
Tsing Hua
Environment
View
Scene
Scenery
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
Campus
Campus
Part
Size
1
3
2
1
Wonderful (1)
Pretty (1)*
Picturesque(4)
Enchanting (1)
Gorgeous (1)
Big (5)
Collocates
2
1
1
1
Great (1)*
Large (5)*
Huge (1)*
Note: *indicates synonyms included in the online units.
checked against the illustrations in WordNet or A modern guide to synonyms
(Hayakawa, & The Funk & Wagnalls Dictionary Staff, 1969). Table 7 shows the
number of students who successfully induced patterns for each synonym (see an
example of students’ induced patterns in Appendix B). Overall, the inducing task was
a challenging one for this group, but on average the accuracy rate of all five units
reached 0.59, over half of the cases, across the 30 target words for the 19 participants.
It was found that in unit 2, there were more successful tries in induction (N ¼ 66,
accuracy rate ¼ 0.69) than in the other four units, while unit 3 had fewest (N ¼ 45,
accuracy rate ¼ 0.47). The success rate for induction may be common in an educational setting where the deductive approach, instead of data-driven learning, had
been the norm for the participants in their six years of high school study in Taiwan.
For unit 2, students did quite well in indicating the types of nouns following the
synonyms of beautiful. However, the words in unit 3 were of greater difficulty when
students were required to find the differences among the synonymous words. This
was especially obvious with words such as challenging and rough. Moreover, it was
observed from the tracker record that students did not recognize that pretty was
synonymous with beautiful and rough with hard. In fact, two of the students simply
presented pretty with the meaning of ‘‘rather’’, and rough with the meaning of ‘‘not
smooth’’.
On average, the accuracy rate of induction throughout the five units for the 19
participants reached 0.59, barely over half. Perhaps due to unfamiliarity with
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Y. Yeh et al.
Table 7. Numbers of appropriate induction about the five units based on participants’ process data
Overused adjectives
Alternative words
Number
Sub/total
Unit 1 important
Critical
Crucial
Influential
Serious
Significant
Vital
14
13
10
9
11
Unit 2 beautiful
Charming
Good-looking
Handsome
Lovely
Pretty
12
14
12
17
11
66/95 (0.69)
Unit 3 hard
Challenging
Problematic
Rough
Tricky
Tough
8
11
6
10
10
45/95 (0.47)
Unit 4 big
Enormous
Huge
Large
Great
Vast
12
13
10
14
10
59/95 (0.62)
Unit 5 deep
Bottomless
Heavy
Intense
Profound
Strong
9
11
11
13
10
54/95 (0.57)
57/95 (0.6)
inductive data-driven learning or because of the specific educational culture in
Taiwan, the participants, similar to those in Yeh (2003) or Chan and Liou (2005),
were not good at using data to find patterns or at spending time in testing their own
original interlanguage hypothesis. They also showed various success rates of
appropriate induction possibly due to either the inherent association strengths of
the AN collocations or to the artifact effect of item difficulty.
Learners’ Perception of the Five Online Units
The data from the background questionnaire, the evaluation questionnaire and
interviews were coded and analyzed to reveal students’ feedback on the online units.
In the responses to the evaluation questionnaire, around half the students (52.6%)
reported that they liked the synonym learning, 36.8% held a neutral attitude and
10.5% of the students responded with a negative attitude. Half of the students
(53.1%) found it difficult to make distinctions among semantically similar words.
Similar to findings of previous studies (e.g. Chan & Liou, 2005; Yeh, 2003), a great
Synonym Units and Concordance for Writing
147
majority of students (72.7%) indicated that it took much time to analyze corpus data.
Merely 31.6% of the students reported that the instances of the AN collocates
provided by TANGO were sufficient to differentiate the synonyms, while about half of
the class (47.4%) held neutral opinions. Student’s feedback on this item was beyond
the researchers’ expectations because one of the researchers, having been in a college
English program for six years throughout her undergraduate and graduate studies,
had examined the AN collocates in TANGO to make sure the instances provided in
the online materials were sufficient for the participants to induce patterns. The
students who participated in the study, however, were in their first semester of a
college English program and therefore may have found it difficult to make successful
inductions out of the instances provided in the online materials. This conflicting
result seems to hint that adequate English proficiency is one key element for
successful induction. How to effectively scaffold weaker learners in their induction
process with e-referencing tools such as TANGO or other bilingual concordancers
warrants future research.
Specifically on the usefulness of TANGO, the participants mostly (73.7%) agreed
that mutual translations in the Chinese – English bilingual concordancer helped them
learn English synonyms effectively. It seems that TANGO was more effective than
other regular print dictionaries. The observation made in the current study that
synonym search using traditional print materials was unsatisfactory to the participants
was compatible to the study by Harvey and Yuill (1997) in which synonym searches
with a dictionary were considered unsuccessful by EFL learners.
The researcher also interviewed the participants 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
completed the exercises. Students also recommended that online units include other
types of collocations, such as Adv – Adj, for word search.
Conclusion and Implications
The current study investigated whether online units could increase EFL learners’
awareness and application of synonymous adjectives. Nineteen college Englishmajors in a freshman writing class participated in the study. The major findings
indicate that students made significant improvement in synonym use in the controlled
tests and still maintained that knowledge two months after they completed the online
learning units. It was also found, from the comparison of the pretest and posttest
essays, that the participants improved their overall writing quality and performance in
the use of synonymous adjectives. The participants were able to induce some patterns
for the target words of 30 synonyms with various degrees of success. On average, the
accuracy rate of induction was over 50%. Students’ feedback showed that they did
benefit from concordancing learning though it was somewhat difficult and timeconsuming to discover the differences among synonymous words.
In light of the findings, some pedagogical implications can be drawn for EFL
teachers and researchers. First, the collocation concordancer, TANGO, could be
used for facilitating vocabulary learning since it offers appropriate AN collocations
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Y. Yeh et al.
and provides alternative words for writing. In teaching, teachers could present
semantically related words and concordance lines from TANGO so students could
benefit from comparing and contrasting the synonyms in context. Teachers could
also pinpoint the differences between words if induction turns out to be too difficult
for most students. For learners’ self-instruction, TANGO could serve as a consulting
tool for them to search through possible collocates for a proper alternative adjective
for use. Further, students can be encouraged to check specific collocates that go with
a certain synonymous adjectives, which they already have in mind for use, so as to
serve their purpose in speaking or writing. By so doing, appropriate adjectives with
collocates could be found for the appropriate context in speaking or writing.
Second, teachers should consider designing other types of in-class activities to
enhance vocabulary learning, particularly for the words challenging and rough, when
the online materials are not effective enough. The learning units in this study do not
seem to be so effective for learning the synonyms of hard and big; that is, the induction
task and the practice provided in our online materials seems insufficient for students
to acquire the words. Therefore, teachers could provide patterns or hints of word use
for hard and big, or ask students to make their own sentences out of the words for
further practice and discuss them in class for clarification.
Finally, students need thorough training in induction skills before they begin to
study corpus data. Some participants made complaints that inductive learning was
challenging but they did not know what they should put down for distinguishing
the subtle differences on the summary page. As traditional teaching methods in
Taiwan emphasize deductive teaching, students lack 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 EFL
curriculum.
The small number of participants was one major limitation of the study. For future
research, more participants could be invited so that the result can be generalized to
other populations of English learners with different backgrounds. Also, with regard to
the size of the learner corpus collected for analyses, more writing should be collected
in the future in order to elicit additional data on students’ adjective use in free
production. At this writing, more student essays were being collected in this EFL
country; given careful error tagging, useful information can be yielded from a large
learner corpus for the future. Moreover, a longitudinal study could be conducted to
observe students’ word use over a longer duration since students might need more
time before they could acquire semantically similar words and apply them in actual
writing. In that case, better vocabulary measurement is needed to gauge students’
productive use of synonyms in writing.
Acknowledgement
This paper is sponsored by the National Science Council in Taiwan (NSC94-2524S007-001). Thanks go to Jason S. Chang and his graduate students for development
of TANGO.
Synonym Units and Concordance for Writing
149
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Appendix A
Samples of Exercises in the Online Units
A. substitution practice
(direction: ‘‘Please fill in a word that could replace ‘important’
In the sentence’’;
The button: ‘‘submit my answer’’)
B. gap-filling practice
(direction: ‘‘Please fill in the required number of synonyms to make the sentence a
complete one’’;
The button: ‘‘submit my answer(s)’’)
Synonym Units and Concordance for Writing
151
C. translation practice (direction: ‘‘Please translate the following sentence
into English and use the most specific adjective’’; The button: ‘‘submit my
answer(s)’’)
Appendix B
An Example of Students’ Induction
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Y. Yeh et al.
The summary page
The notepad
Critical
Nouns : moment, juncture, time
Usages : a turning point.
Crucial
Nouns : factor, juncture, point, importance
Usages : a decisive point.
Influential
Nouns : figure, group, member
Usages : to describe something is effective and
representative.
Serious
critical
Sentences:
critical acclaim
Comments:
: problem, crime, accident, shortage, loss,
error
: something is important because of
possible danger or risk; hard to solve
Significant
Nouns : change, impact, increase, sum, number
Usages : something has a meaning or important
and considerable.
Vital
Nouns : organ, energy, part, function
usages : extremely important, especial
related to existence or life.
crucial
Sentences:
This also gave rise to a crucial question:
Comments:
give rise ¼
question:
influential
crucial
Sentences:
influential group
Comments:
serious
Sentences:
serious study
Comments:
That’s mean study hard and want to
make out something.
significant
Sentences:
significant change
Comments:
a fast and huge change significant:
vital
Sentences:
vital function
Comments:
This allows vital functions such as police
services, customs, medical services
and transportation services to
continue to operate year round
without a break.