Study On Corpus-Based Feedback In Teaching Of Academic English Writing

This study investigates corpus-based feedback in teaching of academic English writing for Chinese English learners by Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis on the basis of a self-compiled written corpus consisting of assignments of Chinese postgraduate students from non-English majors with two reference corpora:the BNC and the BAWE. The study consists of two parts:(1) investigation of English usage of learners in writing;(2) application of corpus-based feedback in academic writing teaching and monitoring the language development of the learners.The paper reports the analysis and effect of an experiment to teaching academic writing in which students got feedback which was based on the data and results from the corpus analysis of their own assignments. The course was made up of6weekly2-hour sessions. The participants (N=205) came from2multidisciplinary classes of first-year postgraduate students. Mixed methods were used in the study. Quantitative analysis was concentrated on the self-compiled learner writing corpus consisting of5-session assignments with Problem-Solution Pattern. On the contrast analysis, the results showed:(1) There are differences between Chinese students and British students in terms of use of articles, personal pronouns, modal verbs, adjectives, nouns, etc.(2) Students already mastered some signals for Problem-Solution Pattern writing, but the types and flexibility were restricted.(3) On the analysis through5-time homework, an interesting tendency occurred. When the researcher found an underuse word and showed it to the students on the feedback period in the classroom, a dramatic increase of the use of the word could be found in the next assignment. But in the following assignments, we could watch a slow opposite tendency of the data. The overuse situation was the opposite.Qualitative data, collected from two survey questionnaires in the first and last session, showed generally positive results. A majority of students found it new and effective to use corpus-based feedback in the writing course. Most students noticed the differences between their own writing with that of native speakers and were enthusiastic about working with the corpus and agreed that the corpus-based analysis helped them improve their writing and intended to learn it more in future.The study demonstrated the effect of the corpus-based feedback in the English writing course in terms of specific words and students’ attitude to the new way of feedback and writing teaching with corpus tools. The results have some implications for understanding lexical development in L2academic writing as well as improving writing pedagogy. Due to the nature of Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis which could only find out existing problems, the distinctive features found in this study might be only part of the real situation. In addition, the short teaching period made it impossible to further explore the effect of the corpus and other corpus usages in classroom. However, the study practiced one corpus use in classroom, which could enrich the writing teaching with corpus.