Using Corpus Tools for Academic Writing in EFL Settings: A Data-Driven Learning Approach

Abstract

Previous research studies indicate that developing writing skills is a challenging process particularly for EFL learners. Academic writing puts an additional burden on the learners’ shoulders as it requires some further advanced skills, such as genre awareness, lexical flexibility, and complex syntactic knowledge, to name but a few. Corpus Linguistic Approaches to language analysis (i.e., Data-Driven Learning) has the potential to guide L2 writers in their attempt to follow the academic genre and learn the required writing skills inductively. Corpora can be exploited in three stages: observation of concordance evidence, classification of salient features and generalization of rules. Learners as the discoverers of language in this approach can benefit from the versatile features of corpora and learn from the patterns they observe through the concordance lines. In the light of the given approach and its potential to create more autonomous EFL learners, this chapter attempts to (a) explain what data-driven learning is and how it may shape the learning experience in an EFL context, (b) elaborate on how corpora can guide EFL learners in academic writing and (c) provide some hands-on uses of corpora in teaching/learning (academic) writing.

Keywords