Abstract

In the past two decades, corpora have been proposed as valuable computer-assisted tools for teaching and learning academic writing in English at the university level. This article reports on an empirical study that sought to examine the effectiveness of direct corpus consultation in overcoming vocabulary errors in academic writing. This study is part of a larger research project that also investigated students’ attitudes towards direct corpus consultation activities in terms of overcoming vocabulary errors and promoting their learning autonomy as well as the difficulties they encountered. A quantitative quasi-experimental design was used in the present study, which involved 32 Saudi female undergraduates majoring in English for nine weeks of the fourteen-week writing course. Data collection instruments included a pre-post vocabulary test and pre-post writing tests. The results of quantitative and content analyses suggested that direct corpus consultation decreased vocabulary errors and improved students’ academic writing quality. The corpus consultation tasks significantly affected students’ ability to overcome the four targeted types of vocabulary errors (collocation, connotation, word form, and spelling). Furthermore, the results showed that the effectiveness of corpus consultation tasks in improving students’ vocabulary knowledge and usage varied depending on the type of vocabulary error. On the vocabulary test, collocation errors had the smallest decrease and medium effect size, whereas, on the writing post-test, connotations were the least developed type. The study concluded with some pedagogical implications for using direct corpus consultation to develop students’ vocabulary knowledge and usage, as well as recommendations for future research.

摘要

在过去的二十年中，语料库被认为是大学英语学术写作教学的宝贵计算机辅助工具。本文报告了一项实证研究，旨在检验直接语料库咨询在克服学术写作中词汇错误方面的有效性。这项研究是一个更大的研究项目的一部分，该项目还调查了学生对直接语料库咨询活动在克服词汇错误和促进学习自主性方面的态度以及他们遇到的困难。本研究采用定量准实验设计，让 32 名英语专业的沙特女本科生参加了为期 14 周的写作课程中的 9 周。数据收集工具包括事前词汇测试和事前写作测试。定量和内容分析的结果表明，直接语料库查询减少了词汇错误，提高了学生的学术写作质量。语料库咨询任务显着影响学生克服四种目标类型词汇错误（搭配、内涵、词形和拼写）的能力。此外，结果表明，语料库咨询任务在提高学生词汇知识和使用方面的有效性因词汇错误的类型而异。在词汇测试中，搭配错误的下降幅度最小，影响大小中等，而在写作后测中，内涵是最不发达的类型。