Postsecondary EFL students’ evaluations of corpora with regard to English writing

Recently, as a corpus, which has been mainly used for linguistic analysis, is emerging as an innovative tool in language learning, a growing body of research has paid attention to the efficacy of corpus use from educational perspectives. Given that corpus use for pedagogical purposes entails autonomous and independent learning of language learners, it is important to uncover how corpus users evaluate it based on their own experience. While most of the previous studies were conducted in the ESL settings, the present study sets out to examine postsecondary Korean students’ opinions of general and specialized corpora with regard to their own English study and writing in the EFL setting. The questionnaires which twenty-eight students of two corpus workshops submitted were analyzed in terms of their evaluations of corpora as well as their prior writing experience, reference use, and attitudes towards English study and writing. The results show that the respondents, being dissatisfied with their English skills, were eager to increase their overall English skills and English writing skills. During English writing, they usually used two to three language references including bilingual dictionaries followed by monolingual dictionaries and Internet search engines. The results also prove that the respondents regarded corpora as helpful language references and that they would use them and recommend them to other students. The respondents, however, expressed disparate attitudes towards specialized corpora. In general, corpora were considered more appropriate to the intermediate and advanced levels of students in terms of language proficiency and academic experience. Using corpora for pedagogical purposes merits further research to validate its efficacy and investigate the possibility of its application in Korea.