Literature Review

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Literature Review
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Terminology

• Authentic Materials
• Texts (written or spoken) designed for native
  speakers (Harmer 1991)
• Text not specifically produced for language
  learning (Nunan 1989)
• Concordance Program/ Concordancer
• Used to find examples of authentic usage
• Operates on a corpus
• Arranges words (maintaining context info)
• Alphabetically
• By frequency

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Areas of Focus

• Assessment of language learning strategies
• Curriculum design is curriculum structured
  well?
• Curriculum content did student learn?
• Overcoming difficulties using authentic materials
• Assessment of concordancers
• Student preparedness
• language fluency
• Corpus investigation skills

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Assessment of language learning strategies

• Curriculum content goals
• ODowd (2003)
• Email exchange result in intercultural learning
• Qualitative one-year study
• Discussed both successes and failures
• Curriculum design
• Ghardirian et al. (2002)
• Encounter of words gt 5 times
• Text contains 95 of known word tokens

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Overcoming difficulties using authentic materials

• Assessment of concordancers (tool and usage
  skill)
• Corpus investigation skills
• Mollering (2001)
• German language learning
• Concluded that concordancer is useful tool
• German modal particles
• Resulted in development of worksheets
• Kennedy Miceli (2001)
• Italian corpus in a language learning program
• Students frustrated due to lack of own
  investigation skills
• Resulted in curriculum revisions
• Curado (2001)
• English for Special Purposes (ESP)
• Concordancer useful for college-level learning
• St. John (2001)
• Pilot German-English study of concordancer usage.
• Corcordancer supplemented teaching materials
• Students able to independently perform corpus
  investigations

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Overcoming difficulties using authentic materials

• Assessment of concordancers (tool and usage
  skill)
• Language fluency
• Wang (2001)
• Chinese-English study on eight subjects
• Students developed in-depth lexical knowledge