Notes on Direct and Indirect Access to Corpora: An Exploratory Case Study Comparing Students’ Error Correction and Learning Strategy Use in L2 Learning by Hyunsook Yoon & Jung Won Jo (2014) pt1

Yoon, H., & Jo, J. W. (2014). Direct and indirect access to corpora: An exploratory case study comparing students’ error correction and learning strategy use in L2 writing. Language Learning & Technology, 18, 96-117.

Introduction

• Data-driven learning (DDL) has shown positive effects to L2 learning.
• There are advantages and disadvantages in in-/direct use of the corpora.
• Research gap #1: comparative examination of both; hopes to address course and material design in how “L2 is taught and learned” (p. 98). Specifically, the “possible differences in student’s correction behavior” (p. 99) in both settings.
• Research gap #2: studies investigating learner strategies in corpus use and concordance analysis. “This is a critical missing link that should be established for corpus-based learning in the whole framework of L2 pedagogy” (p. 99).

Research Questions:

1. Can corpus-based writing revision improve the students’ grammatical and lexical accuracy?
2. What are students’ error correction patterns relative to direct and indirect corpus use, and is there any difference in the effectiveness of such patterns?
3. What learning strategies do the learners employ in direct and indirect corpus use?

Methodology

• Subjects: Four freshmen EFL students with varying level of English and interest in English writing.
• Data Collection: Quantitative and qualitative. Collection of students’ writing, introspective and retrospective reports.
• Duration: 10 weeks, from March 28 to May 30, 2011.
• Online corpus: Lextutor