Induction from self-selected concordances and self-correction

Abstract This paper investigates three growing areas in language teaching, namely, induction, the use of concordances, and self-correction. For a class of students at a Thai university, lexical items causing errors in writing were identified, the students made small concordances of the lexical items from the Internet, and they then induced patterns from the concordance to apply in self-correction of their errors. Generally, students were able to induce valid patterns from their self-selected concordances and make valid self-corrections of their errors, and there was a strong correlation between these two abilities. Their ability to induce and self-correct, however, was perhaps affected by the part of speech of the lexical items focused on, and their ability to apply the induced patterns in self-correction was influenced by other aspects of the lexical items.