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The participants used i-Conc, a suite of reference resources, both to test their intuitive hypothesis on L2 forms formulated based on their existing linguistic repertoires (i.e., for

or that were temporarily inaccessible due to memory lapse (i.e., for compensatory purposes). The actual queries they performed on i-Conc to solve these two types of problems were in turn prompted in two question forms: a whether question or closed-form question (verification), and a what/how question or open-form question (elicitation). As a group, the participants were shown to address more confirmatory problems and perform more verification queries during their writing assignments. This result confirms the findings of previous studies (H. Yoon, 2005; Park, 2010) in that the participants were shown to prefer using the corpora to confirm what they already knew rather than for discovering new facts about the target language. This overall trend can be in part attributed to the very fact that the participants used i-Conc as a reference tool rather than as a research (DDL) tool. In most DDL research, where the use of corpus tools were explicitly aimed to facilitate language learning through helping the learner to derive rules and regularities mostly by chance discovery, queries usually performed were predominantly of elicitation type. In contrast, in the present study, the reference resources were consulted to resolve immediate problems that arose while engaging in an authentic writing task, which in large part involved checking the acceptability of text segments already formulated in mind or on screen especially at the editing or proofreading stage of the writing process.

The participants as a group consulted i-Conc for a wide range of purposes, but more than 70% of their queries were carried out for four purposes: doing simple confirmation (SC, 24.3%), checking whether the target item delivers the intended meaning (Mn, 21.0%), finding or

verifying a collocate (Coll, 18.4%), and finding an L2 equivalent (Equi, 10.9%). To look into only the primary (or initial) queries (from which motivations that prompted each i-Conc consultation can be inferred), the order changed as follows: Coll (21.2%), Equi (18.0%), SC (16.3%), and Mn (15.5%). This shows that SC and Mn queries were performed often as secondary queries to get corroborations for the primary query results.

To consider again only the top two purposes of the primary queries, collocation proved to be the most frequent purpose the participants consulted i-Conc for. Specifically, the

participants searched for prepositional collocates the most frequently, followed by verbal and adverbial collocates. This result is similar to that of Park’s (2012) study, where finding and verifying appropriate prepositions and collocations were the most frequent purposes11. It can be

11 _{In this study, consultation purposes were classified somewhat differently with queries for lexical collocations and}

interpreted that collocations, especially prepositional collocates, were the most problematic area for this specific group of participants. However, an alternative explanation would be that the concordancers were introduced to the participants as particularly effective tools for finding collocates during the training, and this step sensitized them to the problems of collocation and made them notice them more often than they normally would. This was indirectly verified by what some participants (Jae and Yumee) said in their interviews. One of the changes they experienced while using the suite was that they became more aware of and attentive to the lexico-grammatical aspects of vocabulary they used in their papers. This pattern echoes one of the main findings from H. Yoon’s (2005) study wherein participants raised their language awareness while using the corpus technology as a problem-solving tool.

Next, finding an L2 equivalent, or Equi, came out as the second most frequent purpose of the primary queries, suggesting that the participants, highly advanced L2 writers, working on an academic topic in their individual fields of study, to which they had been exposed mostly in English for years, still had to resort to their L1 frequently in conceptualizing content and to translate that into English. Analysis of the participants’ drafts and their stimulated recall protocols showed that Equi queries were in fact closely related to the type and topic of writing the participants did. Equi queries were shown to be carried out mostly in the sections of a narrative nature or where L2 culture-specific content was discussed. This result is one of the unique findings of this study in that most of previous concordancing studies could not capture these needs of L2 writers as they either did not provide along with corpus tools resources that could be consulted for Equi purposes or even when they were provided, the purposes they were used for were not examined. The only exception is Frankenberg-Garcia (2005), but the task done in that study was a translation task, which cannot be directly comparable to the types of academic writing the participants in the present study did.

In terms of linguistic categories, the participants’ queries were predominantly about lexical (45.6%) and lexico-grammatical (43.7%) concerns, which is consistent with Manchón’s (2011) analysis that the closer the writing task is to free writing, the more attention the L2 writer pays to lexis as opposed to grammar.

Turning now to the individual resources consulted, the participants as a group were in general well aware of what types of inquiry each resource was suitable for and so consulted them accordingly for distinctive purposes: Bilingual for Equi, COCA and JTW for Coll, Google for SC, and Monolingual for Mn, to list only the top purpose for which each of the major

resources was consulted. To break down the participants’ queries by linguistic categories, the participants showed a tendency to perform queries of lexical concerns in the dictionary-type resources while consulting the concordancer-type resources more for lexico-grammatical and stylistic matters.

In terms of consultation frequency, Bilingual came out on top. This result was rather unexpected in that when designing the reference suite, this resource had initially been intended as just a supplementary resource, which had not been expected to be consulted much in

academic writing while the training and feedback were heavily focused on the various, often novel, ways of solving linguistic problems using the concordancers. This tendency runs counter to the findings of previous studies conducted in similar settings (e.g., Park, 2010; H. Yoon, 2005). In those studies, dictionaries were available to use along with corpus tools while completing general academic writing tasks, and the participants developed over time a strong preference for the corpus tools they were provided with over bilingual dictionaries. In

Frankenberg-Garcia (2005), the bilingual dictionary was the most preferred resource, but again, the task done in that study was a translation task, which by its nature required frequent

consultations of the bilingual resource to find and confirm L1-L2 equivalents.

This frequent use of the bilingual dictionary in the present study, rarely observed or reported on in detail in previous research, can be attributed to a number of factors. First, as with most L2 learners (Tono, 2012), bilingual dictionaries were often the primary language reference resources that the participants had been using since they started to learn English and therefore they were most familiar with. Second, as noted in the previous section, the participants performed a great number of Equi queries, and Equi was the unique consultation purpose that could be served almost exclusively by Bilingual. There are a few other interesting factors that are closely related to the versatility of Naver, the specific online bilingual dictionary featured in the present study. Naver, developed by Korea’s biggest search engine provider with the same name, is not simply an online version of a paper bilingual dictionary, which is the case with most of freely available online monolingual learner’s dictionaries. But rather running on not

only multiple source dictionaries, but also a large database of Korean-English translation pairs of sentences, its functionalities go beyond the traditional bilingual dictionary to serve as a thesaurus and a parallel corpus. In addition, running on a powerful search engine, it is fast and stable but more importantly it allows multi-word searches and returns results in the concordance format along with the usual dictionary information of each constituent word. Taking full

advantage of this versatility, the participants used Naver for the widest range of purposes of all resources.

Among the concordancers, COCA was consulted the most frequently and for the widest range of purposes, and most balanced in its use for both verification and elicitation queries, reflecting the variety of information that can be extracted from the resource with its query operators and options. However, this frequent use of COCA by the participants may not be an accurate indicator of their actual preferences. COCA was one of the new reference resources introduced to them, and they were encouraged to use as often as possible, so a novelty effect and also their awareness of being observed through screen recordings may have affected their

choices of this resource. In fact, while all participants agreed that COCA was the most useful resource along with Bilingual, some criticized it for being too unwieldy with all its search options and complicated interface to be a handy reference resource to use while doing an actual writing task.

JTW, another concordancer in i-Conc working with a tagged corpus, proved to be a simple-to-use but powerful resource that provided a comprehensive range of collocational combinations in an organized way. Some participants (Ian and Goeun) found it especially learner-friendly and preferred it to COCA. However, after several consultations, other

participants (Jae, Yumee, and Shia) simply stopped using the resource due to its unstable server and slow loading time. This trend suggests that the speed with which a tool can process a query and load the results can be an important factor that affects a writer’s choice of reference tools. In this study, three Google search engines (Google, GS, and CSE), differing in size and scope of data sources, were included as concordancers. Well aware of the strengths (abundant data) and weaknesses (“dirty” and untagged data) of using a search engine as a language reference tool, the participants used Google predominantly for SC purposes, that is, confirming their hunches about L2 forms, and some participants even used it as their main resource. In contrast, GS and CSE were consulted the least frequently, accounting for less 5% of all resource

use respectively. This was another unexpected result, along with the frequent use of Bilingual, as these two search engines had been included in the suite specifically to meet the needs of graduate students’ disciplinary writing. During the tutoring sessions, the participants welcomed the inclusion of these resources in the suite for their potential for supporting their writing in terms of discipline-specific phraseologies, but in actual use they often became frustrated as GS and CSE, due to their small data size, returned no or few matches for queried items. This result does not necessarily mean that they are not useful resources for L2 writing. As some GALL (Google-assisted language learning) researchers suggest, these specialized Google engines can be great DDL research resources for investigating the differences in writing conventions between genres and disciplines such as referencing practices or types of reporting verbs (see Brezina, 2012; Hubbard, 2005 for examples). However, when used as a reference resource to find solutions to immediate problems that need to be solved to move ahead with the writing task at hand, the participants were not particularly motivated or able to conduct such investigations. As noted above, in this problem-solving context, the participants attempted to use these

resources, instead, for quick confirmations on their hypotheses, and they proved to be

ineffective as reference resources. The presence of Google Web next to them also contributed to their underuse. Google Web, one of the most familiar resources to the participants, was the only resource where, because of its sheer size, the participants could actually gauge the acceptability of their hypotheses against frequency information and readjust their queries accordingly. Realizing that GS and CSE did not allow much room for meaning negotiation because of their small sizes, most participants went straight to Google Web for SC queries.

Taken together, these findings provide some answers to the question “how corpus resources co-exist with online services like Google and online dictionaries,” asked by Perez- Padres, Sanchez-Tornel, and Alcaraz Calero (2012, p. 484). First, the present findings suggest that the use of concordancers as problem-solving tools while engaging in independent writing tasks may differ widely from when they are used as DDL tools for classroom tasks. The

participants showed overall tendencies to (a) verify their existing knowledge more than to elicit new knowledge; (b) consult the bilingual dictionary more frequently than concordancers; and (c) prefer Google Web to more specialized search engines for quick confirmations. Second, the resources were shown to be mutually complementary. The participants overall consulted each concordancer for the purposes it was optimally suited for, and the participants strategically used

the different resources in combination within single problem spaces, especially in the form of getting a hint from one resource and expanding on it in another resource. These findings lend support to the arguments of some corpus-based language teaching researchers (e.g., Conroy, 2010; Flowerdew, 2009; Tribble, 2002) that corpus tools should be used in addition to, not in place of, more traditional resources. Third, however, as suggested by Naver, which has been evolving from a bilingual dictionary into a hybrid resource providing bilingual concordance lines, and also different types and functionalities of concordancers, the boundaries within and across resource types will get more and more blurred with further advances in computing power and text processing technologies.