코퍼스를 활용한 학습 활동이 대학생의 영문법 학습능력에 미치는 영향

Effects of corpus-based learning on college students' English grammatical competence

The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of corpus-based learning on college students' English grammatical competence inductively. A total of 126 Korean university students from low to intermediate level of language proficiency participated in the study for two and a half hours per week over a four-week period in 2013: Sixty-four students of the experimental group learned English grammar rules using a set of corpus-based tasks inductively, while 62 students of the control group learned English grammar rules following teacher's instructions deductively. Results of the study indicate that the corpus-based learning group, the experimental group, made much higher progress in their learning of both simple and complex grammar rules than the teacher-guided control group. Regarding the students' understanding of grammar rules, the experimental group understood difficult grammar rules better than the teacher-guided control group. The study suggests that corpus-based learning help learners better in their understanding of English grammar rules when they are taught inductively using the corpus data collected from a natural communicative situation. For this reason, an effective use of corpus-based authentic materials will be very helpful in developing learners' grammatical competence in English. Further studies are needed in relation to the effective use of corpus data for different college student groups with the higher level of language proficiency or even for other different age groups of students in the elementary or secondary schools.