The Effectiveness of Corpus- Based Approach to Language Description in Creating Corpus-Based Exercises to Teach Writing Personal Statements

Abstract

Using corpora in language teaching has revolutionized language research with its 'authentic' appeal. Corpus tools have enabled linguistic researchers and teachers to investigate actual usages and the characteristics of certain genres in order to improve syllabus design and infer more effective classroom exercises. From this perspective, this paper attempts to use corpus tools to investigate the characteristics of one of the most important requirements of university programs admissions which is the personal statement. Despite the immense importance of writing a personal statement in the lives of students wanting to enroll in universities, little research has been conducted on its instructions. More importantly, teaching its features to university students has been neglected although personal statements are an essential genre that should be emphasized in academic writing classes or university preparation courses. The paper aims to investigate if compiling a corpus of personal statements can lead to creating an effective corpus-based activities to be taught in teaching writing a personal statement. Then the paper attempts to evaluate the pedagogical implications of using corpus-based activities and criticized the weaknesses and strengths of corpora as a resource in language teaching. This paper chose to focus on personal statements collected from law students due to the high demand on law colleges in Saudi Arabia and the difficulty of admission requirements. This study used Sketch Engine® to complie a corpus of sixty-seven personal statement with a total word count of 50, 691, then analysed the lexio-grammatical features. The results were used to create corpus-based excersises to be taught in writing courses teaching personal statements.

The effectiveness of corpora on Saudi EFL academic writing performance

“…As discussed previously, the results of the post-test have revealed that there is an improvement among the students regarding their lexico-grammatical writing abilities compared to their pre-test results. Moreover, this result is consistent with that of the studies mentioned in the relevant literature (e.g., Yoon, 2008;Alharbi, 2015;Almutairi, 2016). The findings of Alharbi (2015) and Almutairi (2016) are similar to the findings of the current study in terms of the written tasks.…”

“…Recently, a plethora of research studies conducted in various Saudi EFL contexts revealed that Saudi EFL learners seem to lack the competence of performing as well-independent skilled writers (Alharbi, 2019;Obeid, 2017;Alrabai, 2016;Almutairi, 2016;Mohammad and Hazarika, 2016;Alkubaidi, 2014). Writing is considered to be a high-order skill that needs learners to think critically and be aware of the language lexical and grammatical patterns (Obeid, 2017).…”

“…The number of studies that have applied corpus tools in the EFL Saudi context indirectly as a method of preparing language materials and exploring and investigating specific patterns or values is significant (e.g., Al-Khateeb & Almujaiwel, 2018; Almujaiwel, 2018). Nevertheless, there are few empirical studies that have attempted to apply corpus-based teaching and learning to academic writing skills (e.g., Alharbi, 2012;Alattar, 2014;Alharbi, 2015;Almutairi, 2016;Alshehri, 2018).…”

“…In a recent study, Almutairi (2016) aimed at assessing the efficiency of CBA to writing instruction in making corpus-based tasks to teach personal statement writing to EFL learners in the Saudi context. Also, his study sought to evaluate the effectiveness of using corpus-based activities and outline the limitation and potential of corpus tools as a resource in ELT.…”

Taiwanese English Majors’ Acquisition of Technical Vocabulary in TESOL Profession

“…The empirical studies (e.g., Arno-Macia & Mancho-Bares, 2015) concluded that it is important for learners to acquire technical vocabulary for gaining disciplinary writing improving academic writing. Limited studies explored English majors' acquisition of technical vocabulary in their TESOL field through the specific data, such as interviews, questionnaire, or course evaluation (e.g., Blakemore, 2012;Cheung, 2010;Schenck & Cho, 2012;Zareva, 2013). Different sources of data collected in this study were used to explore English majors' acquisition of technical vocabulary in the TESOL course and influence of the acquisition on their academic performance and writing.…”