Two-way Data-Driven Learning: Pedagogical application of English-Chinese parallel concordancing

Parallel concordancing in English and Chinese - a corpus-based technique which has been developed to respond to the desire to study the two languages side by side in their natural contexts of use - is a relatively new research area. Since 1997, the author has been compiling an English-Chinese parallel corpus and developing the English-Chinese Parallel Concordancer (E-C Concord) software package for pedagogical and research use. In this presentation, features and functions of both the PC and online version of the English-Chinese Parallel Concordancing software will be demonstrated first, and the pedagogical application of parallel concordancing in English and Chinese will then be illustrated through examples of corpus-based two-way Data-Driven Learning (DDL) activities, which allow learners themselves to research and explore data sets and to generate hypotheses. At the end, the value of using parallel texts in English and Chinese learning will be discussed in detail. It is hoped that the pedagogical potential of parallel concordancing in English and Chinese can be fully recognized and further explored, so that more learners can benefit from this innovative two-way Data-Driven Learning approach.