Turkish Efl Learners’ Reflections on Corpus-Based Language Teaching

Abstract

The aim of this study is investigating Turkish EFL learners’ reflections on corpus-based language teaching; what kind of benefits or drawbacks they have experienced during a corpus-based implementation, and what possible suggestions they can make about this particular experience of theirs. The data was collected through minute papers and semi-structured interviews; and content analysis was conducted for data analysis. The results indicated that the participants found the corpus-based instruction very effective especially thanks to the fact that they could interact with real life data directly. They emphasized that interacting with genuine native speaker language made them more motivated and interested in the classroom. In terms of drawbacks, they stated that sometimes the concordances were difficult to understand. Nevertheless, the learners had a positive perception of corpus-based language teaching instruction. Keywords: Corpus-Based Language Teaching; EFL Learners; Reflection

Perceptions of Turkish EFL Student Teachers Towards Learning Phrasal-prepositional Verbs Through Corpus-based Materials

“…Additionally, they stated that they needed guidance or help from the teacher in order to analyze and understand the concordance lines. These findings are in line with the findings of Simsek (2016), who found that learners agreed that concordance lines were difficult to understand. However, the learners in the current study did not think that learning the verbs via the materials was more difficult than learning them via a dictionary.…”

“…In addition, 'involvement' might have been associated with 'learning' or 'gaining' in the learners' minds, as they mostly agreed that using the materials improved their L2 phrasal-prepositional verbs knowledge, as well as boosting their confidence in learning them. These findings confirm the findings of the studies of Chan and Liou (2005) and Simsek (2016). Chan and Liou found that learners enjoyed using a bilingual concordancer in the learning of verb-noun collocations.…”

“…Similarly, Chao found that learners mostly agreed that using concordancing in collocation learning was effective. Additionally, the findings are also in line with the findings of the study of Simsek (2016), who found that learners mostly agreed that corpus-based implementation was effective.…”

“…By examining the reflections of 31 freshmen students at an English Language Teaching (ELT) department in Turkey, Simsek (2016) investigated the perceptions of EFL learners towards a six-week corpus-based implementation conducted to teach transitional adverbials. The reflections were taken through minute papers collected each week and a semi-structured interview.…”

“…Some of learners might not even interpret and generalize information, as concordance lines present information in different formats (Yoon & Hirvela, 2004). To the best of the researcher's knowledge, very few studies have explored the perceptions of learners towards using such sources keeping these concerns in mind in the Turkish EFL context (e.g., Girgin, 2011;Simsek, 2016). As such, how Turkish EFL learners perceive such sources after they actually use them during their vocabulary learning is not clear.…”