The Effect of Concordancing based Teaching on the Student's Vocabulary Retention

Vocabulary learning is at the heart of language learning and language use. In fact, it is what makes the essence of a language. Having it in mind, most of the students always complain about lexical problems and unfortunately the students and sometimes the teachers are unaware of the different tools, which can help the students in order to learn vocabularies and improve vocabulary retention. A useful tool for learning and teaching vocabularies is a tool that uses authentic examples and sentences to enhance learners' comprehension. Concordancing software is one of these digital tools that enables language learners to explore billions of real-world materials. In this regard, the present study was conducted to investigate whether the use of concordancing software has a significant effect on vocabulary retention or not? In order to gain this purpose, a sample of ۵۴ female students took part in this study. Participants were randomly assigned in two equal experimental and control groups. Before starting the treatment, the researcher gave the pretest to both groups to check their vocabulary knowledge. Then the treatment sessions were started for both groups, which lasted ۱۲ sessions and during this time the vocabulary of each lesson waa taught by using concordancing software to the experimental group and by using list of vocabulary to the control group. After the treatment sessions, the posttest was administered. The results of the comparison proved that the use of concordancing software improved learners' vocabulary retention. The outcomes have the potential to affect learners' performance.

Keywords:

CALL , DDL , corpus linguistics , concordancing , retention