Language Testing in Focus: An International Journal

Acquisition of polysemous words is a prevalent and difficult process. This study aims to investigate the effectiveness of concordance on the acquisition of polysemous words, compared with the traditional teaching method. Participants were 127 Chinese EFL learners in senior high school. They were randomly assigned into Experimental Group (EG) to be treated with paper-based corpus and Comparison Group (CG) to be instructed with the traditional method. The test instrument and teaching material was developed based on Corpus Concordance English. Acceptability judgement was used to test learners’ performance. Data was analyzed according to independent- and paired- sample t-test via SPSS (version 20.0). Results from independent sample t-test of posttest scores of both groups indicated that concordance and traditional teaching method was equally effective in terms of polysemous words learning. However, paired sample t-test of pre- and post-test scores of each group suggested when compared with the traditional method, concordance is more efficient to fulfil greater enhancement. Therefore, this study provides empirical evidence of the positive impact of concordance on the acquisition of polysemous words. Limitations and implications were discussed.