Thesis (M.A.) - Cairo University - Faculty of Arts - Department of English

Writing in a foreign language is challenging for non-native users of the target language (TL). EFL learners' writing has many problems that range over issues relating to grammar, style and diction. These are the issues that stand out and most teachers pay attention to in their teaching and feedback. Fixing these issues, however, does not seem to solve the problem, as another feature that marks their writing persists. This has to do with the way they put together their thoughts and form sentences, which results in sequences that, even though may not be ungrammatical, sound nonnative like. More specifically, the problem concerns students{u2019} use of collocations in their writing, which appears to be directly transferred from their first language. To a great extent, the problem seems that these student writers think in their L1 and then render their thoughts in English. Their writing, as a result, is comprehensible only to a reader familiar with their mother tongue. This study intends to investigate this problem and explore the effectiveness of using concordance of an online corpus (COCA) as a tool for authenticating writing in a foreign language (English) by Egyptian learners whose native language is Arabic. A treatment of consulting COCA and analyzing naturally occurring language on its concordance lines is applied on one group of the participants for later comparison with the other non-user participants

Issued also as CD