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In what ways do you think incorporating the corpora studies into EFL writing instruction is beneficial for EFL learners? What are some challenges for such an integration?
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Many people find writing as a laborious and a painstaking process both in the mother tongue and in the second/foreign language. It is not difficult to predict the reason behind: writing requires a great deal of conscious effort, it takes time, and it is not always possible to produce a good piece of work no matter how hard you try. You can spend hours on your writing but this does not mean that you will end up with a perfect essay. These partially explain why writing is unbearable for most of the learners.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, when we look at the issue from the teachers’ point of view, writing is still very troublesome and arduous. It is very reasonable of learners to expect feedback on their work. However, giving an accurate and a comprehensive feedback in process writing may be time consuming for the teacher. Also, confronting with numbers of corrections may have a discouraging effect on students. Less comprehensive feedback reduces teachers’ workload, but it may not provide sufficient support for less proficient learners. Furthermore, as stated in the article, a greater focus on accuracy is likely to reduce the amount of actual writing practice and affect students’ fluency while less attention may deprive them of the feedback they need to develop their writing skills.
Instead of spending hours on giving comprehensive feedback, correcting each and every mistake, using online corpora is a more effective and timesaving way in dealing with mistakes. Corpora provide us with large collection of texts produced by native speakers of English. They are freely available online and can be incorporated into the redrafting stages of process writing.
Teacher can mark or highlight only the problematic areas and ask students to use the corpora to correct and make their work more natural. This can be very helpful for the students in many ways. First of all, it is an inductive approach and encourages cognitive processing of errors by students, leading to long term benefits. Secondly, when students are trying to find solutions to their own problems, they encounter many new usages of the same word, leading to vocabulary development. Finally, it is also useful for students in their development of reading skills, especially in skimming and scanning (This is valid in BNC which is less user friendly in terms of highlighting keyword or the phrase). However, the situation is different for less proficient learners. They may have difficulty in finding the selection of key words for their searches and the interpretation of the resulting concordance lines. The wrong choice can easily produce misleading information. This may discourage the students as well as causing frustration.
Using corpora to develop writing skills has its own advantages and disadvantages. For some learners it may work well, but for some others it doesn’t. However, I believe it can be a useful source in language classes. It is worth trying.
Languages have two major skills in their bodies; receptive skills and productive skills. Receptive skills are listening and reading which are more likely to be learned easier than productive skills; speaking and writing. As it can be concluded from the statement, teaching writing is also a demanding job for teachers. It needs time and hard work for both teachers and learners. However, there are many new techniques to teach writing in a more meaningful and a more practical way. One of them is using “corpora”.
ReplyDeleteCorporas are large collections of texts (books, newspapers, journals, transcribed speech, etc.) produced by native speakers of English, which are stored electronically and can be accessed by using a search software. Users type in a word/phrase to generate ‘concordance lines’ (randomly selected lines of text containing the target language) which are extracted from the corpus. British National Corpus (BNC) (http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/) and the COBUILD Corpus and Collocations Sampler (http://www.collins.co.uk/Corpus/CorpusSearch.aspx) can be good examples for the corpora.
But what are the advantages of using corpora for teaching writing? First of all, they are free of charge, online and can be usefully incorporated into a process writing approach to help develop students' writing skills. Secondly, they can be usefully exploited in the redrafting stages of writing to both minimize the teachers' workload and encourage greater cognitive processing of errors. In other words, corpora is a teacher-friendly way to encourage students to focus more on error correction, while at the same time providing them with the support they need. Thirdly, these freely available online resources can be used to highlight problematic areas in students' essays and then to allow them to use the corpora to generate their own hypotheses on how to make their writing more natural. According to Williams and Burden (1997), this way of dealing with error correction is more in line with constructivist theories of learning from developmental psychology, which see individuals as active participants in the construction of their own personal meaning from the experiences they have. In this way, learners are encouraged to find their own solutions to their own particular problems which help them to create the conditions necessary for language acquisition to occur.
To sum up, although the technique is time consuming and may be hard to teach learners how to use the corpora, it can reduce teachers’ workloads by providing learners with the support they need to make corrections autonomously, without the necessity of lengthy explanations in the margins. Finally, the corpora help learners to concentrate more on global issues of cohesion and coherence rather than just accuracy.
Writing is considered to be a demanding job for many students and it is also hard to teach writing and make students develop their productive abilities in writing. As the research field of teaching foreign languages is broadening, we come across with many different strategies to teach language skills. Teaching languages and assessing the knowledge of the students is a troublesome process, because the learning of the students is not observable all the time. Similarly, there may be very different answers to one question. In other words there is no one answer to a question or no one correct form of using the language. This situation leads teachers to a very demanding process in correcting, analyzing and evaluating students’ works in the target language. This evaluation process is not only hard but is also time consuming for the teachers. Teachers need to be very careful while giving feedback to the students. A corpus is a method to cope with these problems of giving feedback.
ReplyDeleteIn linguistics, a corpus or text corpus is a large and structured set of texts (now usually electronically stored and processed). They are used to do statistical analysis and hypothesis testing, checking occurrences or validating linguistic rules on a specific universe. Using corpora is quite advantageous in the way that it is easy to use it helps to save time, it is accessible online, and it is free of charge. Using this method for error correction lightens teachers’ burden. With the help of corpora, students will be able correct their own mistakes and will have more responsibility for their own learning. I think it is an important point to make students autonomous.
To sum up, this method can be used in language classes and it can work with many students. Many teachers can find it useful as it helps the teachers to lose less time on correction. I think, students may also like this method. I, as a teacher can use this method; at least I can try it.
Zeynep ÇİÇEK
Burcu Deryan
ReplyDelete1619980
Using online corpora to develop students’ writing skills
Alex Gilmore
Writing is a more painful process for the learners in a foreign language than in the native language. It may also cause problems for teachers since they will likely have difficulties in balancing the needs of individual students for meaningful feedback with the unfortunate reality of ever-increasing workloads. There are some feedback methods including complete reformulation of errors by teacher, in-class peer feedback, selective feedback by the teacher on specific issues or target language of current concern, minimal marking (marking codes, underlining problem areas, etc.), and no feedback on errors. However, these methods may have disadvantages such as not proving sufficient support for less proficient students and sometimes such as time consuming for the teachers.
Online corpora can be effective solution for those problems in feedback process. Online corpora sources are large collections of books, newspapers, journals, transcript speech, etc. produced by the native speakers of English. These online resources can usefully be incorporated into the redrafting stages by highlighting the problematic parts in students’ writings and then allowing them to use the corpora to generate their own hypotheses. That is, students are active in learning process and their learning autonomously leads to effective and permanent learning. Teachers can benefit from online corpora by making students use it, so students see their errors and learn to write naturally and also teacher saves time by reducing their workload. On the other hand, students experience difficulties in deal with internet since they may be lack of the technology knowledge and they may have not access to the internet. Probable technologic problems may be time consuming for the learners. At this point if students should firstly be trained about how to use the online corpora, these online corpora will likely be relatively beneficial for the learners and teachers.
Writing is generally thought as a demanding and painful process for students because it takes time and students put their effort on it but it is not always possible to produce a good writing material. Moreover it is also a demanding job for teachers to teach writing and improve students writing abilities since it is burden on teachers to correct every mistake of students and give them feedback and these processes are very time consuming from teachers’ point of view. Although there are several feedback methods such as reformulation of errors by teachers, peer correction, selective feedback by the teacher, minimal marking and no feedback these are not sufficient to provide each student with an efficient feedback and evaluation process. Therefore teachers have great difficulties in analyzing, correcting and evaluating students’ productions in the target language. The article says that a greater focus on accuracy is likely to reduce the amount of actual writing practice and affect students’ fluency while less attention may deprive them of the feedback they need to develop their writing skills. By looking at all the problems above it is possible to say that analyzing, correcting and evaluating the students’ writing productions are a bit troublesome. However a corpus is very useful in terms of dealing with mistakes and time saving. They are freely available online and can be incorporated into the redrafting stages of process writing. Therefore teachers can make the students use corpora in order to see and correct their own mistakes and so the students can improve their writing abilities with the help of corpora. Moreover they are easy and free to use and students can find them online. There are several benefits of using corpora. First of all these freely available online resources can be used to highlight problematic areas in students' essays and then to allow them to use the corpora to generate their own hypotheses on how to make their writing more natural. Secondly, they can be usefully exploited in the redrafting stages of writing to both minimize the teachers' workload and encourage greater cognitive processing of errors. Finally, when students are trying to find solutions to their own problems, they encounter many new usages of the same word, leading to vocabulary development. However the situation is not the same for the less proficient students. These students may have problems with finding the key words or interpretation of results. These problems may discourage the students as well as causing frustration. All in all, I think the corpora have both advantages and disadvantages but this method can be used in language classes in order to save time and help the students in writing process.
ReplyDeleteIn writing, process is more important the production. However, process writing takes a lot more time than product writing. Teacher gives feedback to every stage students undergo. That is both time and afford consuming one to do it. However with the help of corpora, students may not just rely on teacher’s feedback. They could help themselves using these corpora. Since there are a lot of texts they can use. Even I use some kind of corpora. When I do not know what is the collocation of a certain word, I just google it. For instance, I wonder it is worth mentioning or worth to mention. I just write the sentences on the google and the correct one appears immediately because some people in the world used it in his/her writing some time ago. It is a very good way to check myself. Also, corpora are free to use, less time consuming than both type of writings. Moreover, they shorten the time of the teachers and give them an opportunity to do other activities besides writing. Students give immediate feedback about the target language and their attention span will not broken easily.
ReplyDeleteBut I think that applying corpora method is a little bit difficult. Students may have difficulty to understand how to use corpora. But I believe the classroom management rule, which is 3=33. You may spend 3 weeks to teach how to use corpora but you save the other 33 weeks.
To sum up, corpora are very useful way to write. It gives a lot of advatages to the teacher and students.
UGUR UZER