micro-concord: a language learner’s research tool tim johns english for overseas students unit,...

8/18/2019 MICRO-CONCORD: A LANGUAGE LEARNER’S RESEARCH TOOL TIM JOHNS English for Overseas Students Unit, Depa…

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MICRO CONCORD: A LANGUAGE LEARNER’S RESEARCH TOOL

TIM JOHNS

English for Overseas Students Unit, Department of English, University of Birmingham,Birmingham BI5 2TT

Micro-concord is a simple interactive KWIC keyword-in-context) concordancingprogram that runs under a variety of configurations on the Spectrum homemicrocomputer. Based on the proposition that CALL computer-assisted languagelearning) should, if it is to make maximum use of the possibilities opened up bythe new technology, involve more than simply making the computer a sort ofsurrogate teacher or trainer Higgins, J. and Johns, T. Computers in LanguageLearning, Collins 1984), it offers both language learners and language teachersa research tool for investigating “the company that words keep” that has hithertousually been available only on mainframe computers to academic researchers insuch fields as computational linguistics, lexicography, and stylistics Hockey 1980).

SOFTWARE

The program is tiny, in its current version comprisin, 0 a shell in BASIC of approximately1K that is responsible for input word to be concordanced, loading of text files) and amachine-code routine 390 bytes long that identifies occurrences of the key word in the textfile, and prints out citations on an Epson-compatible printer in 74- or 130-column formataccording to the specification of the user:

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The machine code for the program was written in the Spring term of 1985 to illustratetext-handling techniques in 280 assembler for a group of Algerian students following anEnglish for Science in Engineering course at Birmingham University in preparation forpostgraduate courses and research at universities in the UK. Instead of employing thetraditional strategy in ESP of teaching the English of technology, I adopted the alternative

approach of teaching a specific area of technology-in this case computing-through themedium of English using a handout-based workshop approach similar to what the studentscould expect in their eventual departments. For most of them, computational methods usinga high-level language such as FORTRAN or PASCAL would form an important researchtool, and a course in FORTRAN was provided by the Department of Computing of theUniversity in the Summer term. Rather than anticipate that work, I decided to concentrateon the architecture of a typical microprocessor not only as that might be of some interestin itself particularly for the students specializing in Electronics or Robotics), but also onthe assumption that an appreciation of the workin, 0 of the 280 and the structuring ofprograms in a low-level language would help them towards a better understanding of thepotential and the limitations of high-level computer languages. The involvement of the

students ranged from a number of decisions on the structure of the program for example,the decision to use delimiters rather than loop counters as exit conditions), to theidentification and typing-in of texts, and the preliminary experiments on the ways in whichthe program could be exploited in language-learning.

The overall structure of the machine-code routine is shown in the simplified flow-diagramFig. 1). Points to note are:

1. On entry to the routine, the text-file will be resident at location 758AH: this gives roomfor files of over 34K, though in practice due to the limitations of the word-processorTasword Two) used to prepare text-files, most files will be 20K in length i.e. a little

more than three thousand words). The word to be searched for has been POKED bythe BASIC shell program into a buffer at 7530H. Both the text file and the buffer usethe character with code 127 the copyright symbol) as a delimiter: this was chosen asone that can be readily inserted at the end of the file using the word-processor, andthat is unlikely to be needed within text.

2. In searching for the target word, the routine checks for the upper-case equivalent ofa lower-case character in the buffer, but not vice versa: thus ‘computer’ in the bufferindentifies both ‘Computer’ and ‘COMPUTER’ in the text, but ‘Computer’ does notidentify ‘computer’. This may occassionally be of use to the user for indentifyinginstances of a word used in sentence-initial position. The routine is able to recognizethe standard initial and final word delimiters in text, including hyphens. In additionto single words, the routine allows the user to search for phrases such as ‘in order to’or ‘as a result of’.

3. The routine uses an asterisk as a wild card signifying “any number of characters,including no characters, within the word”. This makes it possible to identify inflectedforms and variants of a lexeme-thus

‘consider*’ identifies ‘consider’, ‘considers’, ‘considered’, and ‘considering’-and also ‘considerable’, ‘consideration’ etc.


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),lICRO-CONCORD: .A L.-\SGU.ACE LE.ARNER’S RESEARCH TOOL 153

‘kn*w*’ identifies ‘know’ , ‘knew’, ‘knows’, ‘known’, ‘knowing’, ‘knowledge’etc.‘n*theless’ identifies both ‘nonetheless’ and ‘nevertheless’

It also allows the user to examine text for occurrences of a particular morpheme or

grammatical feature-for example

‘*ing’ identifies all present participles as well as a number of other items suchas ‘bring’, ‘thing’, ‘sing’, etc)‘*fer*’ identifies a wide range of etymologically related words such as ‘refer’,‘different’, ‘reference’ etc.‘*?’ identifies all direct questions in the text.

4. All printing is handled from within the routine, including the sending of control codesfor enlarged printing, headings) emphasized printing 74-column printout) andcondensed printing 130-printing printout). While 130-column printing gives a more

Fig. 1. Micro-concord: Flow diagram of machine-code routine.


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154 TIM JOHNS

extended context for an item, students have tended to prefer 74-column printout whichis more legible and easier to scan rapidly. The citations are numbered, using a subroutinein the Spectrum ROM provided for the line-numbering of BASIC programs. The routineprovides two entry points, the first of which sets up the printer, prints out the heading,and resets the number counter to zero: the second is for use with the microdrive and

disc versions of the program see below) where multiple text files are to be searchedfor a target word, and the printing-out of the citations is to continue from the pointreached with the previous file. As is usual with KWIC concordances, citations are givenas single lines of context with the target words printed centrally i.e. with 30 charactersof preceding context for 74-column printout, and 60 characters for 130-column printout):this format facilitates rapid scanning of a number of citations in order to examine thelinguistic features that the contexts have in common, but has the disadvantage thatthe context is arbitrarily chopped off often in mid-word) at either end of the citation.

5. The speed of the routine is best measured by the time taken for an unsuccessful searchof a 20K text file. This is to some extent dependent on the number of near-misses that

the routine examines: in a good case attempting to match ‘xxxx’) the routine takes0.37 seconds, and in a bad case attempting to match ‘thex’) 0.57 seconds. These timingsmean that the speed of the program will depend on the time taken to load text filesand to print out citations: that is to say, it is a function of the hardware rather thanof the software.

HARDWARE CONFIGURATIONS

The basic hardware required to run the Micro-concord program comprises:

A 48K SpectrumA printer interface the program was developed using a Kempston Centronicsinterface).

An 80-column printer I use the Brother M1009, which is a versatile and relativelyinexpensive dot-matrix printer: it has the advantage that it recognizes the standardEpson control codes for enlarged, condensed, and emphasized printing).

The potential power and flexibility of the program depends largely on the capacity, speed,and convenience of the medium used for storing text-files. Three configurations are possible:

1. Cassette-basedThis is the cheapest, but also the most limited. A 20K file takes approximately 2 minutesto load from cassette, and cassette allows only limited and clumsy file-handling. With sucha system it is practicable to search only a single file for instances of a particular item:adequate in studying the contexts of high frequency grammatical items e.g. prepositions,auxiliary verbs) and certain technical and semi-technical terms specific to a particular setof texts, but making it difficult to sample properly most items with a frequency higherthan 1: 500, or to study a wide range of texts, without a great deal of irksome jugglingof cassettes.


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2. Microdrive-basedThe Sinclair microdrive is a ‘stringy floppy’ high-speed tape loop) system that gives muchof the speed and convenience of discs at a fraction of the expense. The capacity of themicrodrive is between 85K and 95K, which will accommodate both the Micro-concordprogram and four 20K files i.e. just under 14,000 words of text). With a microdrive it

is possible to implement a “turnkey” system: all the user has to do is to turn on theequipment, select a cartridge and insert it in the microdrive, and press ‘R’ for RUN) andENTER: the Micro-concord program will then autoload, ask whether 74- or 130-columnprintout is required, and then scan through all the files on the cartridge (or only thosespecified by the user) for citations of any item requested. An unsuccessful search of 80Kof text including the time needed to print out the heading and to locate and load fourtext-files) takes approximately 50 seconds: that is, less than half the time needed to loada single file from cassette. Experience has shown that a microdrive-based system allowsthe investigation of a much wider range of items than can readily be handled using cassettestorage.

3. Disc- basedA number of disc interfaces are available for the Spectrum. Using the interfacemanufactured by Technology Research, and an go-track double-sided Cumana disc drive,the time needed for an unsuccessful four-file search is reduced to 20 seconds. Moreimportant, the capacity of such a system 660K per disc-i.e. 110,000 words of text) makesit possible to base on a humble home computer such as the Spectrum a system that beginsto approach in power and flexibility the “professional” concordancing packages availablehitherto only on much more sophisticated and less accessible machines.

TEXT ENTRY AND CLASSIFICATION

The increased storage capacity and ease of access of systems based on the Microdrive andon disc brings to the fore questions neglected in the early stages of development of theprogram) relating to the selection, entry, and classification of texts. It is part of the approachunderlying the program that a large part of the responsibility for identifying and even forentering texts should remain with the students. Whoever has to do it, there is a great dealof typing to be done to fill one double-sided 80-track disc. Large-scale data-based projectsin Computational linguistics such as the COBUILD lexicography project at BirminghamUniversity increasingly make use of entry methods other than the keyboard-for example

the optical character reader, .and the reading of type-setting tapes. At least one cheapcharacter-recognition device the Omnireader) has appeared for use with microcomputers-however, it appears that this may be too limited as yet to offer a viable alternative tokeyboard entry.

Whatever the method used for entry of texts, it is crucial, if the learner or teacher is tobe able to identify precisely those texts in which he or she is interested, or to make meaningfulcomparisons between different types of texts, that a clear system of classification shouldbe employed that is comprehensible both to the user and to the machine. The best approachappears to be to use the file name to code information as to text classification. For the


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sort of text in which students of our unit are likely to be most interested, the scheme ofclassification needs to take account of:

Department of origin e.g. Civil Engineering, Physics, DevelopmentAdministration).

Topic area e.g. Highway Construction, Computational Methods, Sociology).

Genre e.g. Textbook, Research Report, Lecture, Student Essay)

Numerical key to distinguish text-files with identical classiifications on the firstthree criteria)

Thus a typical g-character file-name the maximum allowed by the TR-DOS system) reads

“TRHIREOl”

Department Topic Area Genre Numerical keyTRansportation HIghway REsearch 01and Environmental Construction ReportPlanning

This system makes it relatively easy for the computer to recover all the texts in the samegenre or genres, for example, across a wide range of Departments and topics-and alsofrom a number of microdrive cartridges or discs.

EXTENSIONS AND DEVELOPMENTS

Experience has shown that a simple concordancer of the sort described above is usable,and that there might be dangers in trying to introduce too many additional refinementsand elaborations. One danger is that the more complex the program, the more inaccessibleit may become. From the point of view of the users, it is an advantage of the present versionthat they do not have to fight their way through a maze of menu options. From the pointof view of the programmer, a short program such as this is easy to maintain: the moreextensions one adds, the more likely it is that bugs will be introduced. In addition-andmore importantly-there is the pedagogic danger that one may, by making the programmore powerful, be giving the machine tasks to do that should be left to the learner.‘Forexample, even if it were possible within the memory limitations of the microcomputer toto do so, it would be of dubious benefit to offer the learner the standard option ofmainframe concordancing packages for printing out a complete concordance for every wordin the text or texts. Not only would learners easily be overwhelmed by the amount of printoutgenerated, but the option would remove from them the crucial decision of deciding whichword or words to investigate.

Despite the dangers of over elaboration, there are certain developments of the programwhich do seem worth making. Some of these, such as the implementation of a suitable


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filing and text-recovery system for the disc-based version of the program, are already inhand. Of those which remain to be coded, four are perhaps worth mentioning. The problemsof devising suitable algorithms for the extensions are not discussed below, though in eachcase this does not seem to present any great difficulty.

At present, citations are printed out in the order in which they appear in the text-files.Particularly where longer concordances are required, it would be desirable to providean option for output that has been sorted alphabetically, so that similar citations aregrouped together. Within such an option it would be necessary to give three choices:sorting by keyword to group variants where the wild-card option has been used): bycontext to the right of the keyword: and by context to the left of the keyword. It isworth noting that the left context option is handled counter-intuitively by somemainframe concordancing packages see, for example, Hockey, 1980, pp. 56-7) in thatthe program sorts by scanning characters in the context from right to left. Thus, giventhe keyword ‘time’, ‘some time’ will be listed before ‘any time’ ‘e’ coming before ‘y’),and instances of ‘longer time’ will not be grouped with those of ‘long time’. Whileit would make the computing a little more complex, it would be more convenient forthe user to have left contexts sorted by words to a depth of three, say, from the keyword.

In order for sorting to be carried out efficiently, it is necessary for citations to be stored,and the sorting carried out, in random-access memory. Given text files of not morethan 22K, and an expanded program-of not more than 5K, the user-available memoryon the Spectrum will allow the storage and sorting of over 100 130-character citationsand over 180 74-character citations.

2. It has already been mentioned that a characteristic feature of the KWIC format is thatcontext is arbitrarily truncated at either end of the citation. This is less of a drawbackthan may at first appear. For most features of the language at and below the level ofthe clause, the context provided is adequate, particularly if the 130-column option isselected. The native speaker familiar with the type of text in the corpus is, moreover,usually able to infer a good deal about the wider context within which the citation occurs.It is, of course, more difficult for the non-native user of the program to make suchinferences, and one of the first reactions of learners when confronted with KWIC outputis to complain about the ‘unfinished sentences’. The writer’s experience is that studentsfairly soon overcome this first aversion, particularly if encouraged to do so by incidentaltasks such as guessing tru,ncated words: guessing the word before and the word after

the citation: completing unfinished sentences: identifying the topic of the text withinwhich the citation occurs: and so on. Working with KWIC output may, in other words,have the added advantage of fostering predictive strategies in reading see, for example,Goodman, 1967). There remain occasions on which it would be valuable to have accessto the wider context, for example to confirm a prediction formed on the basis of atruncated citation. A planned extension of the program is to provide a context-expansionoption which will, after a full KWIC concordance has been generated, allow the userto request an extended context for a particular citation identified by number. The choicewithin the expansion option will be of the sentence within which the keyword appears,together with the preceding and/or following sentences.


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3.

4.

Even with the text storage available on microdrive, \ve have already, on occasion,encountered a problem with the very large number of citations generated by high-frequency keywords: 83K of text files, for example, produces 578 citations for ‘of’ and1,133 citations for ‘the’. At present it is possible to abort a printout by using the Breakkey: a more elegant solution would be to give the user the option of specifying in advance

a maximum number of citations, or that the program should print out every nth citation.

In addition to the general-purpose wild-card symbol already implemented, it wasintended, in the early planning of the program to offer two further wild cards: ‘anysingle character’ and ‘any single character or no character’. Experience in using theprogram has led us to give a higher priority to an ‘alternator’ symbol e.g. ‘/‘). Nojuggling with wild-cards, for example, will recover all the forms of the verb ‘be’ ina single pass through the text-files. If one were able to specify all those forms in a singleinput-e.g. ‘be/being/been/am/is/are/was/were’-then the task of recovering theinformation would be speeded up considerably in comparison with a series of searchesfor each variant, since the time taken by the program to perform a multiple search

would still be negligible in comparison with the time needed to load files more thanonce from external memory. In addition to facilitating searches for variants of a singlelexeme, an alternator symbol would make it easier to investigate the behaviour of lexicalsets-for example, patterns of transitivity and complementation with specific lists ofverbs.

A CONCORDANCE-BASED METHODOLOGY

There are three potential users of a concordancing program: the linguistic researcher, theteacher, and the language learner. While Micro-concord was written with the last in mind,the program may be of some use to others also.

Most computer-based research into text was originally undertaken by scholars concernedwith literary studies Hockey, 1980); in recent years there has been an increasing interestin the application of such research to syllabus design, and the writing of grammars,dictionaries and coursebooks. Sinclair 1985) has claimed that the effect of corpus-basedresearch on English-language teaching is likely to be radical:

On the one hand, there is now ample evidence of the existence of significantlanguage patterns which have gone largely unrecorded in centuries of study: onthe other hand there is a dearth of support for some phenomena which are regularlyput forward as normal patterns of English.

While large-scale linguistic research is likely to remain the province of mainframe computersand the massive databases which they can access, microcomputer-based programs suchas Micro-concord may be able to play a subsidiary role in investigating specialized varietiesof text that are neglected in the large corpora or where the classification systems of thelarge corpora are insufficiently delicate to recover the information required. A disc-basedversion of Micro-concord, for example, would form an excellent tool in the investigationof learners’ writing, permitting the examination not only of recurrent patterns of error,


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MICRO-CONCORD: .A L.ANGUAGE LE.-\RNER’S RESEARCH TOOL 159

but also recurrent patterns of achievement, and also the ways in which they manage toavoid syntactic and lexical problems in the target language.

The second potential user of a microcomputer-based concordancing program is the languageteacher. Skehan 1981) was one of the first to point out the opportunities offered to teachers

by the microcomputer revolution for an on-line research. A concordancer can assist ininvestigating the linguistic features of particular texts and in checking against authenticusage the generalizations made in teaching materials, and serve as a source of exemplificatorymaterials for exercises etc. While this is clearly not the only possibility, it is important thatteachers themselves should have experience in using concordance output if they expect theirstudents to make use of it. In my own case, examining output has often proved chastening:for example a concordance of ‘if’ showed how often in scientific and technical texts it isfollowed by the bare adjective or past participle e.g. ‘if available’, ‘if known’-a usageI found I had neglected in my materials on conditional constructions in English.

The direct use of concordance output with language learners is not entirely novel, althoughthere is as yet only a limited amount of experience on which to draw. At BirminghamUniversity my colleague Antoinette Renouf has, over the past 2 years, experimented withthe use in the classroom of concordances from the COBUILD project based on a corpusof over 20 million words. Ahmad et al 1985) report the use of an interactive mainframeconcordancing program SEARCHSTRING in the teaching of English, German and Russianat the University of Surrey. They point out that the program enables advanced learnersto take the initiative in carrying out their own research into the variable rules of the language,the example they give being the problem of number agreement in English with collectivenouns e,g, ‘The Government is/are agreed’).

Although an interactive concordancer has a number of different uses in language teachingand language learning, it may be worth emphasizing at this point that certain features arecommon to all of them. Viewed as ‘intake’ for language learning Corder, 1967), a KWICconcordance occupies an intermediate position between the highly organized, graded, andidealized language of the typical coursebook, and the potentially confusing but far richerand more revealing ‘full flood’ of authentic communication. By concentrating and makingit easy to compare the contexts within which a particular item occurs, it organizes datain a way that encourages and facilitates inference and generalization. Such generalizationsmay leap out of the contexts in an obvious fashion for example, the word before ‘same’is almost always ‘the’), or may require a good deal more work on the part of the userfor example, in detecting the ‘affective tone’ of an item-see Higgins and Johns, pp. 92-3).

Working with the same concordance, a beginner may be able to draw relatively low-levelconclusions about the structuring of the language: a more advanced learner will be ableto make more subtle high-level inferences. A concordance is from this point of view verydifferent from the conventional constructed exercise in which the learner is searching fora single ‘correct’ answer fixed in advance. Whether any useful learning takes place as aresult of that search will depend on the nature of the task, and the strategies the learnerhas to employ to solve it: in practice, such exercises often fail to promote effective learningsince for a particular learner or group of learners the task is too easy in which case themost the exercise can achieve is to remind the learner of what he or she knows already),or too difficult when, no strategy being available to solve the task, the most that the learner


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can do is to learn the correct answer by heart once it has been revealed). The concordanceis inherently more open and more flexible. Without questions given in advance, it leadsthe learner to generate his or her own questions, and to test them out against the evidence.There is at least a prim f cie case for thinking that the early exposure to authentic textand the skills of observation and inferencing developed in working with concordance output

may be transferred to language learning away from the computer and outside the classroom:this is one of the many aspects of the approach that merit further investigation. What isclear is that the view of language learning as a species of research activity may causedifficulties for some language teachers, particularly if its implications are carried throughin other aspects of the syllabus see, for example, the approach to reading outlined in Johnsand Davies, 1983): our experience to date in the English for Overseas Students Unit suggests,however, that the change of approach is accepted readily by most students providing itis carefully prepared and explained.

The concordance-based materials and activities we have explored to date are esperimental,and do little more than scratch the surface of the new approach. A few examples may

indicate some of the possibilities.

Pre-printed concordance output, and interactive use of the concordancer in theclassroom, can provide a range of exercises and activities supplementary to, and in somecases replacing, more traditional materials. Our work in vocabulary teaching, forexample, lays stress on the development of strategies for guessing unknown words fromcontextual clues: the multiple contexts offered by a concordance gives the opportunityfor the hypotheses generated by one context to be tested against other contexts. In theteaching of grammar, the concordancer is especially valuable in dealing with the crucialarea where syntax overlaps with lesis. A frequent request by my students is for helpwith prepositions in English. One of the first experiments with output from Micro-concord was to use concordances of the half-dozen commonest prepositions, gettingstudents to underline on the printout the head word colligating with the prepositione.g. ‘depending on’, ‘on demand’), and then to develop a system of classification for

the examples they found. The reaction of the students was that this was far more helpfulthan the usual exercise involving ‘filling in the missing prepositions’. With the computeron hand, they soon began to investigate such further questions as whether, judgingfrom the contexts in which they occur, ‘on the contrary’ could be distinguished from‘on the other hand’, and then whether these could in turn be distinguished from‘however’ and ‘nevertheless’. Similarly, a lesson that started by looking at the contextsof the preposition ‘in’ ended with us getting concordances for ‘way*‘, ‘method*‘,‘procedure*’ and ‘process *’ to see if and how these differed in scientific text.

2. One of the more interesting uses of a concordancer is in the teaching of writing, whereit gives students an opportunity to study the ways in which their own performancecompares with that of experienced native writers. Hong Kong Polytechnic possessesan impressive CALL facility based on 21 networked BBC micro-computers: they arein constant use, both on a class and a self-access basis, with word-processing to thefore. During a consultancy visit I paid to the Polytechnic at Easter 1985, David Fouldswrote a version of Micro-concord in BBC basic: we then used the prog;am for anexperimental session with a group of students following a course in interp:eting and


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.LlICRO-CONCORD: ;\ L.VKiU.\GE LE.\RNER’S RESEARCH TOOL 161

translating who had been doing a project on how it might be possible to sell a typicallyChinese product such as rice wine to a European clientele. At the beginning of the sessionthe students were given 10 minutes to write, using the word-processor, an advertisementfor rice wine: their efforts were then amalgamated through the network into one large“student text file”. In the next 10 minutes they entered extracts from authentic

advertisements for wine culled from magazines and newspapers: these were thenamalgamated in a ‘copywriters’ text file”. Using the concordancing program we theninvestigated and discussed with the students the similarities and the differences betweentheir own use of certain key items and that of the copywriters. The word ‘wine’ itself,for example, had a high frequency in both text files-yet in the copywriters’ file it wasusually used as a modifier e.g. ‘wine-growers’, ‘wine district’)-a usage which wasabsent from the students’ file. Was the difference purely linguistic the students havinga poorer repertoire of structural devices) or strategic the copywriters’ purpose beingto sell wine by its associations rather than directly)? The students were remarkably fondof the word ‘connoisseur’, which appeared in a number of different contexts-yet itwas absent from the copywriters’ files: were the copywriters anxious to avoidconnotations of elitism? In the time available, it was possible to do little more thanraise such questions-even so, the session gave the relationship between language andthe writer’s intention, and to do so in a way which emphasized the usage of the grouprather than of the individual.

3. The third, and most important, potential use of an interactive concordancer is as alearning resource to be used freely by-students on their own initiative with the role ofthe teacher restricted to suggesting points at which it may help to solve learningdifficulties. One possibility with which we have experimented is its use in helping studentsto correct their written work, some mistakes being underlined and a ‘C’ placed in themargin signifying “You have used this word in a way which is different from how anEnglish person would use it: if you get a concordance of the word you should be ableto work out a suitable correction for yourself.”

Many questions about the potential of the Micro-concord program remain unanswered.For example, it was developed for a particular type of student adult: well motivated: asophisticated learner with experience of research methods in his subject area) with particularneeds fairly closely specifiable in terms of target texts) in a particular learning/teachingsituation in which a great deal of emphasis is placed on developing students’ learningstrategies and on their responsibility for their own learning). It remains to be seen howfar the ‘research methodology’ outlined above would be suitable for other learners-forexample, children learning a foreign language at school. The writer would be particularlyinterested to hear from other teachers who wish to experiment-or who may, indeed, havealready experimented-with a similar approach for their own students.

REFERENCES

AHMAD, K., CORBETT, G. and ROGERS, .M. 1985) ‘Using Computers with Advanced Language Learners:an Example’, The Language Teacher (Tokyo) 913, pp. 4-i.CORDER, S. P. 1967) ‘On the Significance of Learners’ Errors’, I IL 5, pp. 161-170.


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GOODMAN, K. S. 1967) ‘Reading: a Psycholinguistic Guessing Game’, Jwrnal of he Reading Specialist, pp.126-35.HIGGINS, J. and JOHNS, T. 1984) Compufers in Language Learning, Collins.

HOCKEY, S. 1980) A Guide to Computer Applications in the Humanities, Duckworrh.

JOHNS, T. F. and DAVIES, F. 1983) ‘Text as a Vehicle for Information: the classroom teaching of readingin ESP’. Reading in a Foreign Language, I/l.

SINCLAIR, J. 1985) Retrospect and Prospect: Selected Issues in English in the World: Teeaching and Learningthe Longuuge and Literatures, Quirk, Randolph and Widdowson, H. G. eds.), Cambridge.

SKEHAN, P. 1981) ‘ESP teachers, computers and research.’ In The ESP Teacher: Role, Development andProspects. ELT Document 112, British Council.

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