The Design of an Online Concordancing Program for Teaching about Reporting Verbs

This paper discusses the use of a web-based concordancing program using an interface design similar to the one used at the MICASE concordancing site to help students appropriately choose reporting verbs. Appropriate reporting verbs are important for asserting credible claims in academic papers. An interface was created that asked the students to make lexical, syntactic, and rhetorical choices based on a preset number of criteria related to the decisions writers make in choosing reporting verbs. Based on these choices, the interface could query a database of sentences that had been derived from a corpus of academic writing. The user would then be provided with a small sample of sentences using reporting verbs that matched the criteria that had been selected. The paper discusses how the assumptions about pedagogy for teaching about reporting verbs were incorporated into the design features of the interface and how the implementation of the concordancing site was integrated with the teaching of grammar and vocabulary in an L2 academic writing class.