A Corpus-Based Analysis of Lexical Salience and Association in ESL Writing

Abstract

The current study reviews the concordancer as a vocabulary reference tool for the ESL writing instruction and evaluation of ESL writing quality. Corpus evidence, as studies of corpus-based language learning have argued, can be used to identify typical and atypical usages of vocabulary. The evidence also suggests what words are typically used in the target language writing contexts. Few studies analyzed the actual writing sample text data through empirical research methodology to confirm the arguments. Within a quasi-experimental design, then, the current study analyzes and evaluates the ESL writing sample texts through the corpus linguistic text analysis method and discusses the results of the analysis.