Week 6 Reflection - Corpora in the Classroom

This week's article on applying corpus linguistics to pedagogy by Lynne Flowerdew reminded me of a presentation at the AACL conference in San Diego this year that I really liked and got the most from. The presentation was by Maggie Charles from Oxford University and was on building learner corpora. Not building a corpus of student language, but instead having students build their own corpora of research articles within their field of study. Maggie's class was an academic writing course for international graduate students who needed more practice in formal, academic writing according to their discipline. Her research and presentation were on the effectiveness of having students build their own corpora to improve their writing. In the early stages of the course, her students conducted their own research to find interesting, appropriate, and recent research articles from their own disciplines, and then loaded the chosen articles into their personal, field-specific, and searchable corpus. They then used this corpus as a reference tool to find appropriate expressions, make their writing more professional, check their grammar and wording, and get help with writing in the academic genre of their discipline. In questionnaires she distributed after the course, 94% of the students felt that creating and referring to their own corpus improved their writing ability. Additionally, 86% of the students would recommend using a self-constructed corpus to learn how to write in an academic manner. Furthermore, many of the students continued to refer to their corpus after the class was over, getting continual help in their academic writing endeavors. In the end, Maggie concluded that student-built corpora become valuable long-term tools for students, especially in the EAP setting, engender learner autonomy, and provide for both current and future needs. Much of what we have read and learned about for using corpora have been from the teacher or researcher perspective. I was reminded of Maggie's interesting research and presentation through the Flowerdew article and decided to revisit it for this week's reflection, as other classmates might be interested in a more student-based perspective on using corpora. Of course, Maggie's students were very advanced EAP learners, but it gave me a solid idea of what a corpus-focused classroom could look like and do for the students.