Addressing Language Errors in L2 Students’ Writing: Can Corpora Help?

Direct corpus consultation by learners has been recognized as a means of helping students speak and write standard English by allowing them to look up real world language usage. However, factors such as students’ language proficiency, learning style, and age, in addition to the amount of training students receive in corpus analysis, can impact how effectively they are able to learn from a corpus. The present study therefore aims to see whether, with minimal training, undergraduate students at the American University of Sharjah are able to benefit from corpus consultation and what attitudes they hold towards it. The study also aims to see whether students at higher levels benefit more from corpus analysis than students at lower levels. The subjects of the study included two sets of students: freshmen enrolled in a basic writing course, and juniors and seniors enrolled in an advanced writing course. The corpus chosen for the study was The Corpus of Contemporary American English (Davies 2008-), the largest, freely available corpus of English on the internet to date.