Developing and Evaluating a Learner-Friendly Collocation System with User Query Data

Learning collocations is one of the most challenging aspects of language learning as there are literally hundreds of thousands of possibilities for combining words. Corpus consultation with concordancers has been recognized in the literature as an established way for language learners to study and explore collocations at their own pace and in their own time although not without technological and sometimes cost barriers. This paper describes the development and evaluation of a learner-friendly collocation consultation system called FlaxLC in a design departure away from the traditional concordancer interface. Two evaluation studies were conducted to assess the learner-friendliness of the system: a face-to-face user study to find out how international students in a New Zealand university used the system to collect collocations of their own interest and a user query analysis--based on an observable artefact of how online learners actually used the system over the course of one year--to examine how the system is used in real life to search and retrieve collocations.