Integrating corpora with language classroom: online corpus as an editing tool

Abstract

This work is a case study with the objective of integrating online corpus activities into an English for Academic Purpose (EAP) classroom to help learners improve lexico-grammatical aspects of their writing. This work draws on Johns (1994), Chang (2010), O'Keefee, McCarthy, Carter (2007), Boutlon (2012), Tartoni (2012) and Frankenberg-Garcia (2012), who presented the benefits of integrating a corpus approach in the second language (L2) classroom for improving writing skills. The corpus chosen for the activities presented in this research was the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The participants were undergraduate and graduate students from various courses at UFMG, such as Engineering, Computer Science, Biology, Economy, Design, taking an English for Academic Purposes course. The corpus-based activities were introduced as part of the tasks related to a specific academic written genre: Statement of Purpose (SoP). The data collection took four meetings, which involved collecting students writing before and after their accessing COCA. The students' experiences, using the tools while writing, were registered through Google Form questionnaires. Students writings were marked and edited by the students. The results show that 79.25% of the attempts were successful. In some cases, the students strategy was avoidance (15.38%) or no changes were made (16.67%). Therefore, it seems that learners are likely to improve their writing by accessing online corpora and by discovering for themselves frequent lexico-grammatical patterns.