Post-French Immersion Student Perceptions of Parallel Concordancing: A Mixed Methods Study

I examine the perceptions of students who have graduated from the Ontario French immersion program toward an online corpus at a university in Ontario. No corpus research has yet been conducted on post-French immersion students studying in a French Studies department at university. This study further researches the effectiveness of bilingual corpus use for writing. It presents students with a tool for overcoming language learning plateaus and provides teachers with a model for teaching corpus usage. Through a sequential mixed methods approach, I use a quantitative questionnaire and then qualitative interviews to answer the research questions. Students generally perceive corpus use positively, but not as an answer to every language learning problem, instead viewing corpus use as one of many available tools. Furthermore, students prefer using several websites to verify their word usage. In our information-driven world, students use every internet resource at their disposal to learn a language efficiently.