a study into the effect of concordance-based data-driven learning on iranian efl learners’ vocabulary

The past two decades have experienced rapid advances in the field of corpus studies, with some studies investigating the effectiveness of data-driven learning (ddl), through which students can discover and learn. a substantial number of empirical studies showed that ddl instruction can positively affect students’ learning. this study aimed at investigating the effect of concordance-based data-driven learning on iranian efl learners’ vocabulary learning. to fulfill the purpose of this study, a group of 70 male pre-intermediate learners at nasser language house in gorgan took a piloted oxford quick placement test as a proficiency test and a vocabulary test as a pretest and as a result of which 40 participants were selected as efl learners who were divided into two groups. this research was quasi-experimental, comparison group design. one experimental group received a data-driven learning method (ddl) of learning vocabulary as their treatment right after the pre-test and the other received only the conventional method of learning vocabulary based on the instructions of the book. both groups were instructed by the same teacher (the researcher) using the same book. at the end of the training, 20 sessions, a piloted posttest of vocabulary was administered to both groups. the analysis of the test scores using a mann-whitney u test revealed that there was a significant difference between the mean scores of the two experimental groups’ posttest which means the group receiving the data-driven learning method (ddl) outperformed the other group who only focused on the instructions of the book as the main material and this occurred due to the effect of concordance-based data-driven learning (ddl) strategy treatment. this result may encourage iranian efl teachers to teach vocabulary using concordance-based data-driven learning (ddl) as a strategic vocabulary teaching when dealing with teaching vocabulary effectively.