Saudi EFL learners’ Perceptions of The Use of Corpora in Academic Writing Teaching

Turki Alsolami,Assrar Alharbi

doi:10.22158/selt.v8n4p94

Abstract

The study explores Saudi EFL learners’ perceptions of the effect of applying corpus-based approach as a pedagogical approach on academic writing instruction. The purpose of the study is to evaluate students’ perspectives towards using corpus-based activities on their academic writing learning, more precisely, their lexico-grammatical abilities. In the study, seven female preparatory year students at an intermediate language proficiency level participated. Learners were asked to compose written tasks during three weeks using corpus tools. To explore learners’ attitudes, semi-structured interviews were conducted. The results of the interviews suggest that learners have positive attitudes towards the corpus-based approach to their academic writing performance. Based on the results of the interviews, four themes were found to be recurrent in learners’ responses, which are: Increasing Learners’ Confidence as EFL Writers, Fostering learners’ Language Awareness, Providing Availability of Input, and Promoting Learners’ Autonomy.

Highlights

Over the past half century, a remarkable development in the exploration of English has been accomplished by the utilizing of vast electronic archives of written and spoken naturally occurring language input stored on a computer to be observed and analyzed in which it is referred to by the term of corpora (McEnery & Wilson, 2003)
This study aims at both exploring the relationship between Corpus Linguistics (CL) and English Language Teaching (ELT) and at exploring students’ experience and perceptions on the pedagogical applications of corpora to writing instructions in the context of Saudi Arabia. 1.1 Statement of the Problem When it comes to teaching writing to English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students, teachers might face difficulty in promoting students’ writing skill
This study aims to understand the different aspects of corpus application to writing instruction as perceived by learners. 3.2 Context The site of the study is at King Abdul-Aziz University (KAU), a public university in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, at the English Language Institute (ELI)

Summary

Introduction

Over the past half century, a remarkable development in the exploration of English has been accomplished by the utilizing of vast electronic archives of written and spoken naturally occurring language input stored on a computer to be observed and analyzed in which it is referred to by the term of corpora (McEnery & Wilson, 2003). As writing is a skill that is developed by a redrafting stage where the errors are to be corrected, corpora can provide learners and instructors with a useful resource to search for writing problems from plenty of contexts and solve them based on corpus information. Providing EFL learners with an available access to naturally occurring language data where they can refer to inside and outside the classroom might contribute to a possible improvement in their overall academic writing quality. 1.1 Statement of the Problem When it comes to teaching writing to EFL students, teachers might face difficulty in promoting students’ writing skill This is due to the fact that writing is considered to be a high-order skill that needs the learners to think critically and be aware of the language lexical and grammatical features. The study seeks to answer the following research question: RQ: How do students perceive the implementation of Corpus-Based Approach to their academic writing skill learning upon their lexico-grammatical abilities?

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Conclusion