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ELT Journal Advance Access originally published online on November 11, 2008
ELT Journal 2009 63(4):363-372; doi:10.1093/elt/ccn056
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© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved.

Using online corpora to develop students' writing skills

Alex Gilmore

Alex Gilmore is currently working as a visiting lecturer at Kyoto University in Japan, where he teaches English for Academic Purposes. He has a Cambridge Diploma in Teaching English as a Foreign Language to Adults, as well as an MA and a PhD from Nottingham University. He is also a teacher trainer on the Cambridge Certificate in English Language Teaching to Adults (CELTA) course. His research interests include, among other things, technologies in ELT, materials design, and classroom-based research

Email: alexgilmore{at}mac.com


  Abstract

Large corpora such as the British National Corpus and the COBUILD Corpus and Collocations Sampler are now accessible, free of charge, online and can be usefully incorporated into a process writing approach to help develop students' writing skills. This article aims to familiarize readers with these resources and to show how they can be usefully exploited in the redrafting stages of writing to both minimize the teachers' workload and encourage greater cognitive processing of errors. An exploratory investigation comparing the use of these two online corpora in Japanese university writing classes is then described. This suggests that the participants in the study were able to significantly improve the naturalness of their writing after only a 90-minute training session and that the majority of students found these online resources beneficial, although there was a marked preference for the COBUILD Corpus and Collocations Sampler.


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