The use of general and specialized corpora as reference sources for academic English writing: A case study

Abstract

Corpora have been suggested as valuable sources for teaching English for academic purposes (EAP). Since previous studies have mainly focused on corpus use in classroom settings, more research is needed to reveal how students react to using corpora on their own and what should be provided to help them become autonomous corpus users, considering that their ultimate goal is to be independent scholars and writers. In the present study, conducted in an engineering lab at a Korean university over 22 weeks, data on students' experiences and evaluations of consulting general and specialized corpora for academic writing were collected and analyzed. The findings show that, while both corpora served the participants well as reference sources, the specialized corpus was particularly valued for its direct help in academic writing because, as non-native English-speaking graduate engineering students, the participants wanted to follow the writing conventions of their discourse community. The participants also showed disparate attitudes toward the time taken for corpus consultation due to differences in factors such as academic experience, search purposes, and writing tasks. The article concludes with several suggestions for better corpus use with EAP students regarding the compilation of a corpus, corpus training, corpus competence, and academic writing.

Data-driven Learning in Second Language Writing Class: A Survey of Empirical Studies

“…In 12 of the studies, the exposure to DDL was more than 5 weeks. It seems that studies by Chang [26] and Muller & Jacobsen [33] lasted for the longest time, which was 22 weeks and 6 months respectively. The studies based on longer-time experiment usually started with a course or project and then presented the research questions to evaluate some aspects of DDL, while the shorter-time study often began with the research question and then create an experimental situation mainly in the form of one-time tests or questionnaires.…”

“…Poole [25] presented the benefits of using a localized, specialized corpus to support various corpus-aided activities in an L2 writing classroom. Chang [26] instructed students to use both a general corpus and a specialized corpus which included journal articles and conference papers in the participants' fields. The findings revealed that a specialized corpus is more helpful as reference sources for EAP students' academic English writing due to its direct relevance to their academic fields.…”

“…The second stream of studies explored the effects of using different types of corpora on writing. Chang [26] examined the usefulness of general corpora and specialized corpora as reference resources for academic English writing, while Cotos [37] compared the effectiveness of combining native-speaker and learner corpora and exposing students only to native-speaker data in improving L2 writers' knowledge of linking adverbials. These studies were mainly conducted by comparing the usefulness of different reference tools; however, Geluso [32] made a different comparison, which contrasted learners' initial Google-informed phrases vs final nonGoogle-informed phrases, suggesting that Google could be an effective reference tool to improve the naturalness of their productive language use.…”

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

“…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. He conducted a case study to evaluate L2 Korean engineering learners' consultation of both kinds of corpus; results showed a significant effect of using specific corpora as consultation tools in learners' academic writing.…”

Constructing a Collocation Learning System from the Wikipedia Corpus

“…As a result, difficulties have been reported by language learners, who are ill-versed in both target language and metalinguistic knowledge, unfamiliar with complex interfaces and search functions, and feel overwhelmed by voluminous search results. Learners have to master query syntax (e.g., part of speech tags) and the idea of wild cards Chang, 2014;Chen, 2011), spend time analysing copious concordance lines (Boulton, 2010Chambers & O'Sullivan, 2004;Chang, 2014;Daskalovska, 2015;Geluso & Yamaguchi, 2014;O'Sullivan & Chambers, 2006;Yeh, Li, & Liou, 2007;Yoon & Hirvela, 2004), locate collocates in concordances (Chan & Liou, 2005), and interpret the meanings of concordances, mostly in the form of keyword-incontext (KWIC) fragments and incomplete sentences (Geluso & Yamaguchi, 2014;Yoon & Hirvela, 2004). The differing interfaces and functions of corpus analysis further increase the challenge, and learners generally need to learn a new system in order to access a different corpus (Chang, 2014).…”