Testing the limits of data-driven learning: language proficiency and training

Abstract

The potential for corpora in language learning has attracted a significant amount of attention in recent years, including in the form of data-driven learning (DDL). Careful not to appear to over-promote the field, enthusiasts have urged caution in its application, in particular with regard to lower-level learners, and have argued that extensive learner-training in corpus techniques is an essential condition for DDL to be successful. Such limits seem eminently reasonable, but there is a notable dearth of empirical studies to support them. This paper describes a simple experiment to see how lower-level learners cope with corpus data with no prior training.The language focus here is on linking adverbials in English, which are renowned to be difficult to teach using traditional methods. The subjects are 132 first-year students at an engineering college in France of roughly intermediate and lower levels of English. They were divided into random groups to compare their ability to deal with the target items using traditional sources (extracts from a bilingual dictionary or a grammar/usage manual) or corpus data (short contexts or truncated concordances). Performance was tested prior to the experiment, subsequently to check ability to use the different information sources as a reference, and later to test recall.No evidence was found that traditional sources promote better recall, and corpus data seemed to be more effective for reference purposes. While the results of any single experiment must be treated with caution, these findings suggest the need for more empirical studies to complement the theoretical arguments and qualitative data which currently dominate the discussions of DDL.

Corpus-aided Business English Collocation Pedagogy: An Empirical Study in Chinese EFL Learners

“…These findings brought to a natural conclusion that the instructed learners have been inspired, instead of "taught" to be an autonomous learner in business and English study. The mechanism could be strongly supported by Boulton (2009) as follows.…”

The Impact of the Data-Driven Learning Approach on ESL Writers’ Citation Patterns

“…Citation patterns of undergraduate students and intermediate to advanced writers, however, have been marginalized in this area of research. At the same time, the DDL approach has demonstrated a significant impact in a variety of educational contexts (see, e.g., Flowerdew, 2012Flowerdew, , 2015Boulton, 2009Boulton, , 2010Gaskell & Cobb, 2004;Yoon, 2014). The aim of the present study is to investigate the impact of direct application of corpus use on ESL upper-intermediate to advanced undergraduate writers' authorial voice in an educational writing context.…”

“…Kennedy & Miceli (2010) found a positive effect of the DDL approach on writing, planning strategies, and idea generation with Italian L2 intermediate learners when integrating corpus applications in writing tasks. Boulton (2009) claimed the usefulness of the DDL approach in learning and mastering linking adverbs. Emphasizing the importance of choosing the appropriate type of corpus for a particular task, Chang (2014) investigated the roles of both general and specific corpora in improving L2 writing.…”

Exploring the Effectiveness of Combined Web-based Corpus Tools for Beginner EFL DDL

“…It is possible to sort right and left to highlight aspects of a string, and the number of target concordance lines can be adjusted. A student would type in a search term, for example society, and be able to view patterns in various contexts and then draw conclusions on word usage or grammatical positioning [7,20]. The use of the highlighted words around the aligned KWIC "reduces the information load -especially important perhaps for lower levels" [7, p. 50].…”