Learners as Corpus Researchers

The purpose of this study is to investigate how college students develop their cognitive skills through hands-on concordancing. It examines how students expand their cognitive skills by using self-access online corpus. It was conducted over a two-month period with 27 undergraduate students enrolled in a English Education course at a Korean university. After having lab training on online corpus/concordancer and corpus search, students undertook three corpus investigation tasks. They then submitted written reports after each task. Collected data are examined both qualitatively and quantitatively, with the mixed method, with reference to O’Sullivan’s (2007) descriptions of cognitive skills and concordance learning process by Kennedy and Miceli (2001, 2002), and Sun (2003). Results show the progress of the tested students using their thinking skills when completing three tasks and suggests that direct use of hands-on corcordanceing can help language learners expand their inductive thinking skills effectively.