Can learners use concordance feedback for writing errors?

Sentence-level writing errors seem immune to many of the feedback forms devised over the years, apart from the slow accumulation of examples from the environment itself, which second language (L2) learners gradually notice and use to varying degrees. A computer corpus and concordance could provide these examples in less time and more noticeable form, but until now the use of this technology has assumed roughly the degree of language awareness most learners are aiming at. We report on attempts to make concordance information accessible to lower-intermediate L2 writers. These attempts capitalize on some newly available opportunities as concordancing goes online. Our report: (1) makes a case in principle for concordance information as feedback to sentence-level written errors, (2) describes a URL-link technology that allows teachers to create and embed concordances in learners' texts, (3) describes a trial of this approach with intermediate academic learners, and (4) presents preliminary results.