Postsecondary EFL students evaluations of corpora with regard to English writing

Abstract

Recently, as a corpus, which has been mainly used for linguistic

analysis, is emerging as an innovative tool in language learning, a

growing body of research has paid attention to the efficacy of corpus

use from educational perspectives. Given that corpus use for

pedagogical purposes entails autonomous and independent learning of

language learners, it is important to uncover how corpus users

evaluate it based on their own experience. While most of the previous

studies were conducted in the ESL settings, the present study sets out

to examine postsecondary Korean students opinions of general and

specialized corpora with regard to their own English study and writing

in the EFL setting. The questionnaires which twenty-eight students of

two corpus workshops submitted were analyzed in terms of their

evaluations of corpora as well as their prior writing experience,

reference use, and attitudes towards English study and writing. The

results show that the respondents, being dissatisfied with their English

skills, were eager to increase their overall English skills and English

writing skills. During English writing, they usually used two to three

language references including bilingual dictionaries followed by

monolingual dictionaries and Internet search engines. The results also

prove that the respondents regarded corpora as helpful language

references and that they would use them and recommend them to other

students. The respondents, however, expressed disparate attitudes

towards specialized corpora. In general, corpora were considered more

appropriate to the intermediate and advanced levels of students in

terms of language proficiency and academic experience. Using corpora

for pedagogical purposes merits further research to validate its efficacy

and investigate the possibility of its application in Korea.