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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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ReplyDeleteCorpora are online collection of large texts such as journals, magazines etc. When learners know how to use it, corpora help them to understand their mistakes and edit their writings and express themselves in the same way as English native speakers do.
ReplyDeleteMost of the time, error correction is a huge problem for both teachers and learners. When we look from the teachers’ perspectives, correcting learners’ mistakes is workload for them because they have to decide what kind of error correction method they should use to provide students with the most effective ones and apply the method to the essay of each of the students. It is a really time consuming activity for teachers. When we look from the learners’ perspectives, we realize that they really need feedback to be able to improve their writing skills. However, direct correction of errors by teachers don’t give them the chance to correct their mistakes. Providing learners with the technology by which they can find their mistakes and correct them may be more helpful for learners than correcting the mistakes directly.
These freely available online corpora can be incorporated into the rewriting stages of a process writing approach. Teachers can only highlight the problematic areas of the learners’ writings and allow learners to use the corpora to correct the mistakes and rewrite the problematic parts. Online corpora can have a valuable role in rewriting stages of the long writing process. For busy teachers corpora can decrease their workload by giving the support they need to correct the mistakes. Also, by getting rid of such time consuming process, they can have more time to teach the topics that can’t be understood via corpora. For learners, corpora can serve as a very effective assistant helping them to correct the mistakes.
Beside advantages there may be some challenges in using corpora. For example, teaching using the corpora effectively to the students can be also time consuming process or all of the students may not be able to use it effectively enough since they have different proficiency levels. All of the learners may not have the necessary technological opportunities to use corpora. They may not have internet access or computer.
Writing is very important skill for both teachers and students. Through writing, students produce what they learn and teacher can see what he teaches. It is a production process. What’s most important in this process is feedback. As teachers expect students to produce what he teaches, students also expect teachers to give feedback on their production, so that they can see their development, most importantly their mistakes. There are lots of arguments on the issue of providing feedback on the errors of students. There are different kinds of error correction such as direct correction, peer feedback, selective feedback or no feedback. These have both advantages and disadvantages in themselves. For instance, peer feedback is supported by many teachers as it lowers the workload of teachers, but it cannot be taken as seriously by students and feedback can be wrong or less helpful than teachers’ feedback. Therefore, teachers have really difficulty in deciding which type of error correction is best for both them and the students. At this point, online corpora may be very useful tool for error correction. Online corpora are large collection of texts such as books, journals, produced by native speakers of English, and stored electronically. BNC( British National Corpus) is one of them, and I myself use it sometimes and advise you to use. They can be effectively used in redrafting stages of a process writing approach. As direct error correction is not seen appropriate by most teachers and researchers, by these online sources, after just highlighting the mistakes of students, teacher can ask them to use corpora to see their mistakes and learn how to write more naturally by themselves. So, it has mutual benefit for both teachers and students. It can lower teachers’ workload and it can give chance for students’ self- correction and learn autonomously which is very effective and leads to permanent learning. However, using online corpora also has some drawbacks, especially for students. Firstly, it is very time-consuming. Moreover, students have to have technological knowledge to use online corpora. For instance, I myself have had great difficulty in using BNC, it is a bit complicated, so students should be well informed about how to use them. All students may not have access to computer or internet easily. This is another great problem. However, when the instructions are given about how to use them, and if students have a chance to use , they are very beneficial for both teachers and students.
ReplyDeleteBurcu 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.
USING ONLINE CORPORA
ReplyDeleteWriting, standing as one of the four skills of language learning and teaching process is one of the most problematic area where students have problems. Writing is the time or the point when and where students try to perform their knowledge of language. They have to produce what they have gathered as information through learning process. This painful skill should be managed very effectively in order not to have any problem. While managing this, feedback gains a great importance in order to help students develop their abilities and see their mistakes. Feedback is a bidirectional tool which serves as a mirror both for teachers and students. Through feedback students can see their problems and mistakes and can have the chance to correct them; teachers can understand and analyze their students’ problems and arrange their teaching methods and contents according to this.
However, feedback may be a problem in crowded classes in terms of giving feedback to each student. In such cases giving a general feedback to all class or applying and adopting peer feedback style may help teachers and reduce their burden. But, a general feedback may not be helping for solving specific problems of students related to writing skill and peer feedback may lead other problems such as wrong input and fossilization.
Another way of feedback type or letting students to realize their mistakes in their writing is using an online writing corpora through which students can feedback themselves. They get the chance to evaluate themselves. Using online corpora has very advantageous sides from developing learner’s autonomy to giving correct feedback. Students who are ashamed to ask questions to their teachers or who do not want to take feedback from their peers can easily and effectively use those corpora. It may really help at later stages of writing. Students can benefit from those corpora beyond the borders of classrooms and schools, may be at home or outside. Integrating technology to teaching writing process might be motivating for students who are the children of technology and internet age. Although, using online corpora can be really effective during writing process, it should be regulated and managed very well in so as to hinder other kinds of problems that may arise. Also, this kind of self-feedback may decrease students’ reliance on teacher which may lead to communication breakdowns.
To sum up, using online corpora is a good way to integrate technology into classroom teaching and developing students’ self-confidence, autonomy, self-determination and self-evaluation skills. Also, it is a good way to involve students actively in the learning process.
MEHMET DURMAZ / 1620004
When we say using corpora, we mean that collection big texts as in journals as my friend said. Referencing the article, we can say that writing may be a slow, hard process even in our mother tongue, however when it is in a second language our problems are much more, because we do not have an information deeply in our cognitive thinking ability. it does provide a more solid basis than relying only on intuitions and accepted practice”. A useful application of corpora is to expose students to multiple authentic texts so as to expand their understanding of the functions of words in particular contexts or genres
ReplyDeleteMany corpora are now available, including some on the Web, and teachers can also compile their own corpora for classroom use. However, it is important to realize that results of an analysis may vary among corpora that have different characteristics. As the amount of conscious effort involved in the writing process, learners understandably expect feedback on their work and may feel discouraged if it is not provided. Also, the teachers have some problems balancing the needs of individual students for meaningful feedback.
We have some feedback methods in which there are complete reformulation of errors by teacher, in-class peer feedback, elective 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. There are of course some beneficial sides; they reduce the teacher’s workload, encourage greater cognitive processing of errors by students and promote learner independence, encourage collaboration and negotiation of meaning in the classroom. Also, learners are able to make their own inductive discoveries about the target language as they examine multiple examples of a specific linguistic item in use. The result is student-centered discovery learning, which promotes self-confidence and mastery of the learning process. But, these methods may have problems and disadvantages such as not proving sufficient support for less proficient students and from time to time it may be time consuming for the teachers. Moreover, it may not provide sufficient support for less proficient students to correct errors by themselves.