Data-Driven Learning at the English Drafting Stage

Introduction

Recent years have seen corpora and concordance programs as significant resources for general foreign language (FL) learning and teaching and as practical references for writing in particular. Corpora are formed with a large amount of textual data of language (recent developments include multilingual and multimodal corpora). Many publishers of dictionaries or textbooks advocate the use of corpora for editing and compiling of their products. Those approaches are usually grouped as indirect use of the language corpora. Data-driven learning (DDL, Johns, 1991), that is direct corpus use by learners to acquire linguistic features, is shown to enhance various aspects of language acquisition (Boulton & Cobb, 2017; Chen & Flowerdew, 2018; Crosthwaite, 2019; Pérez-Paredes, 2019). This is also known as learner concordancing (e.g., Liou, 2019). Under DDL, learners have direct access to computer programs with one or several corpora for consultation of lexical-grammatical features, which are called concordancers. Learners with such self-directed methods of observing a great amount of language input are expected to become researchers with inductive abilities of drawing patterns from careful analyses. On the other hand, dictionary users usually view no or a limited set of examples for headword entries but consult them mainly to obtain a sense of meaning. Research showed that a variety of corpus systems were exploited by learners for writing to enhance writing ability (Chen & Flowerdew, 2018). FL learners used concordancers not only for discovering unknown vocabulary while writing but also for error correction (Crosthwaite, 2017; Dolgova & Mueller, 2019; Liou, 2019) or other purposes.

Chen and Flowerdew (2018) examined 37 studies concerning using corpora to assist academic writing instruction. Few of them discussed the literature on using DDL for drafting in the pre-writing stage. The above authors assert that its development is still at an exploratory stage. To illustrate, corpus consultation has been observed and examined in assisting different aspects of writing: cultivating learners’ efficacy in drafting (Kennedy & Miceli, 2017; Wu, in press), revising errors (Crosthwaite, 2017; Dolgova & Mueller, 2019; Liou, 2019), or enhancing writing abilities (Cotos, 2014; Huang, 2014). Concordancers can serve L2 students in the pre-, during, or post-writing stages for various pedagogical purposes. Compared with its many documented applications, corpus consultation at the drafting stage of written texts is much less explored in various educational contexts, and research is even more limited for English-as-a-second/foreign-language learners (EFL). To bridge this research gap, the current action research study aims to investigate how FL learners can apply DDL to discover vocabulary for drafting their writing. The project analyzed the corpus consultation undertaken by three groups of undergraduate EFL students (freshmen and sophomores) for applying the vocabulary item they looked up into their drafts while writing. In this chapter, we hope to add to the literature on the use of DDL in English drafting.