Abstract
English writing plays an increasingly important role in the context of globalization. However, Chinese college students’ writing skills of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) are quite deficient and EFL writing instruction at the tertiary level in China is confronted with enormous difficulties. To handle this situation, we suggest the application of Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) in college English writing instruction to resolve current problems such as learners’ insufficient exposure to authentic linguistic materials, inactive thinking, lack of motivation to write, and teachers’ heavy workload of making assessment. The application of COCA runs through the whole process of writing. At pre-writing stage, COCA is applied for idea inspiration and vocabulary preparation; at while-writing stage, COCA is used for eliminating erroneous usages and improving language quality, especially lexical accuracy and complexity; at post-writing stage, the application of COCA aims at giving effective feedback by improving the quality of different forms of assessment, i.e. teacher, self- and peer assessment.
Highlights
In Mainland China, great importance has long been attached to developing learners’ language skills of English as a Foreign Language (EFL), among which EFL writing attracts considerable attention from educators and students
The present research analyzed the application of Contemporary American English (COCA) in EFL writing instruction at the tertiary level in China
College English writing instruction in China is confronted with enormous challenges, e.g. lack of sufficient comprehensible linguistic input to trigger productive output, heavy workload for the teacher to give timely feedback on students’ writing, learners’ lack of motivation for writing
Summary
In Mainland China, great importance has long been attached to developing learners’ language skills of English as a Foreign Language (EFL), among which EFL writing attracts considerable attention from educators and students. Students are not equipped with the autonomy to make use of the available language resources to develop their EFL academic writing Under such difficult circumstances of college English writing instruction in China, educators and scholars conducted pedagogical experiments or implemented teaching model reforms in English writing classroom. The present study aims to integrate Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), a large-scale online corpus, into English academic writing instruction, for it can provide the learners with abundant, natural, and authentic linguistic data, and by getting access to this online platform, they can develop their autonomy to discover, explore and generalize linguistic rules, and they can use the language knowledge obtained from self-discovery learning via COCA to produce high quality written output and develop their English writing skills
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