The Effectiveness of Using Corpus in Developing Learners’ Awareness of Target Lexis, Grammatical Structures, and Collocations

This study investigated the effectiveness of corpus use in college English class in terms of improving Korean EFL learners’ awareness of lexis and grammatical structures, and knowledge of target collocations, particularly for intensifiers and delexicalised verbs. For this purpose, 63 participants were trained to use a corpus. Before and after lessons, learners were tested with the vocabulary and grammar complete test, and were also required to complete two writing tasks. The results suggest that in vocabulary and grammar complete test there were significant differences between pre- and post-training tests, particularly in terms of collocation matching while knowledge of grammar features compared with lexis awareness was slightly improved in the post-training test. The findings also show that there were obvious differences between pre- and post-training writing tasks when the frequency and appropriate use of intensifiers and delexicalised verbs were considered. Learners’ feedback reveals that there are in some ways contributions of corpus to the learners’ writing performance even though not all of the selected features equally benefit from the lessons of corpus use.