Corpus linguistics has established that language is highly patterned. The use of patterned language has been linked to processing advantages with respect to listening and reading, which has implications for perceptions of fluency. The last twenty years has seen an increase in the integration of corpus-based language learning, or data-driven learning (DDL), as a supporting feature in teaching English as a foreign / second language (EFL/ESL). Most research has investigated student attitudes towards DDL as a tool to facilitate writing. Other studies, though notably fewer, have taken a quantitative perspective of the efficacy of DDL as a tool to facilitate the inductive learning of grammar rules. The purpose of this study is three-fold: (1) to present an EFL curriculum designed around DDL with the aim of improving spoken fluency; (2) to gauge how effective students were in employing newly discovered phrases in an appropriate manner; and (3) to investigate student attitudes toward such an approach to language learning. Student attitudes were investigated via a questionnaire and then triangulated through interviews and student logs. The findings indicate that students believe DDL to be a useful and effective tool in the classroom. However, students do note some difficulties related to DDL, such as encountering unfamiliar vocabulary and cut-off concordance lines. Finally, questions are raised as to the students’ ability to embed learned phrases in a pragmatically appropriate way.

Corpora have been suggested as valuable sources for teaching English for academic purposes (EAP). Since previous studies have mainly focused on corpus use in classroom settings, more research is needed to reveal how students react to using corpora on their own and what should be provided to help them become autonomous corpus users, considering that their ultimate goal is to be independent scholars and writers. In the present study, conducted in an engineering lab at a Korean university over 22 weeks, data on students’ experiences and evaluations of consulting general and specialized corpora for academic writing were collected and analyzed. The findings show that, while both corpora served the participants well as reference sources, the specialized corpus was particularly valued for its direct help in academic writing because, as non-native English-speaking graduate engineering students, the participants wanted to follow the writing conventions of their discourse community. The participants also showed disparate attitudes toward the time taken for corpus consultation due to differences in factors such as academic experience, search purposes, and writing tasks. The article concludes with several suggestions for better corpus use with EAP students regarding the compilation of a corpus, corpus training, corpus competence, and academic writing.

The paper describes a teacher-training course on the use of corpora in language education offered to graduate students at the Institute of Applied Linguistics, University of Warsaw. It also presents the results of two questionnaires distributed to the students prior to and after the second edition of the course. The main aims of the course are: to introduce students to the concept of a corpus and its analysis; to familiarize them with a range of available corpora, corpus-based resources and tools; and to demonstrate to them various applications of corpora in language education, with special emphasis placed on the in-house preparation of courses, teaching materials and class activities. In the first part of the paper, the design, the syllabus, the progression and the outcomes of the course are outlined. In the second part, the responses of thirteen students who participated in the second edition of the course are analysed. The analysis indicates that on the whole the students reacted positively to the course and they saw the benefits of corpus-based materials and tools in language teaching. Yet the students also reported that they needed more time to gain full command of the resources and software presented and more guidance on the pedagogical issues related to corpus use. The paper concludes that fourteen sessions, designed as an overview of the whole range of corpus-based resources and applications, is not sufficient to encourage teacher trainees to use corpora in their future work if they have no contact with these resources and tools in other classes. Only extensive exposure to corpora by future teachers coupled with suitable teacher training in the applications of corpora in language education may bring a substantial change in the scope of corpus use in language classrooms in the wide educational context.