The effect of corpus-based instruction on pragmatic routines

This study analyses the effects of data-driven learning (DDL) on the phraseology used by 223 English students at an Italian university. The students studied the genre of opinion survey reports through paper-based and hands-on exploration of a reference corpus. They then wrote their own report and a learner corpus of these texts was compiled. A contrastive interlanguage analysis approach (Granger, 2002) was adopted to compare the phraseology of key items in the learner corpus with that found in the reference corpus. Comparison is also made with a learner corpus of reports produced by a previous cohort of students who had not used the reference corpus. Students who had done DDL tasks used a wider range of genre-appropriate phraseology and produced a lower number of stock phrases than those who had not. The study also finds evidence that students use more phrases encountered in paper-based concordancing tasks than in hands-on tasks. Unlike in previous DDL studies, observations of the learning of a specific text-type through DDL in the present study are based on the comparison with both a control learner corpus and an expert corpus. The study also considers the use of DDL with a large class size

Production of future forms by L2 English learners

This study examines forms of future expression used by L2 English learners, which can be different from those used by native English speakers. Three types of data were collected for this study—language produced daily by L2 English learners in an ESL classroom, language produced in response to open questions in an interview, and language produced in a Discourse Completion Task (DCT). Twenty-six ESL learners from multiple language backgrounds participated in the interview and DCT portions of the study. Of these twenty-six, five also participated in the classroom production portion. Twenty-seven native speakers acted as a control group. The results of the study show that L2 learners use will in its uncontracted form in contexts where native-speakers generally do not