What are language learners looking for in a collocation consultation system? Identifying collocation look-up patterns with user query data

Corpus consultation with concordancers has been recognized as a promising way for learners to study and explore language features such as collocations at their own pace and in their own time. This study examined 1.5 million search queries sent to a collocation consultation tool called FlaxCLS (Flexible Language Acquisition Collocation Learning System; http://flax.nzdl.org) over a period of two years to identify learners’ collocation look-up patterns. This paper examines and characterizes learners’ look-up patterns as they entered search queries, clicked on the query formation aids provided by the system, and navigated through the different levels of collocation information returned by the system to support collocation learning. We looked at how learners formulated query terms, and we analyzed the characteristics of query words learners entered, the characteristics of collocations they preferred, and the sample sentences they checked. Our collocation look-up pattern analyses, similar to traditional user query analyses of the web, provide interesting and revealing insights that are hard to obtain from small-scale user studies. The findings provide valuable information and pedagogical implications for data-driven learning (DDL) researchers and language teachers in designing tailored collocation consultation systems and activities. This paper also presents multidimensional analyses of learner query data, which, to the best of our knowledge, have not been explored in DDL research.