Abstract:In recent year, there has been growing interest in the use of corpora in ESL learning and teaching. Many studies have argued for corpus use from a teacher’s perspective, that is, in terms of how teachers can develop instructional materials and activities involving a corpus-based orientation. In contrast, relatively little attention has been paid to investigations of learners’ actual use of corpora and their attitudes towards such use in daily English learning. This paper describes a study of corpus use among both international students and professors in the Linguistics Department of University of California, Davis. Specifically, the study examined ESL students’ corpus behavior and linguists’ attitudes towards involving corpus use in language learning and teaching. The study’s quantitative and qualitative data indicates that regular corpus usage among ESL students is still limited in a small range of types and most students increasingly rely on the Internet for their language learning while linguists’ attitudes towards Internet as language corpora are still at variance. Efforts need to be taken on further improvement of the accessibility of current corpora and instructions for students’ properly taking advantage of Internet. 

Keywords: Corpus Linguistics; Corpora; ESL learning and teaching; Process-oriented learning; Leaner’s perspective

Contents

Abstract

中文摘要

Chapter 1 Introduction-1

1.1 Background of the Research-1

1.2 Significance of the Research-1

Chapter 2 Literature Review-3

2.1 Authenticity and data-driven learning-3

2.2 Overall review of English corpora-4

2.3 The importance of learners' corpora5

Chapter 3 methodology-9

3.1 Participants-9

3.2 Questionnair design and interview questions9

3.3 Data collection and analysis.10

Chapter 4 Results and Discussions-13

4.1 Corpus in English learning13

    4.1.1 The familarity of English corpus.13

    4.1.2 Vocabulary and Grammar13

    4.1.3 Writing comprehension13

    4.1.4 Corpus in English classroom.14

    4.1.5 Internet as English corpus: potentials and problems14

4.2 Corpus in English teaching15

  4.2.1The application of corpus in language learning and research -15

  4.2.2 The application of corpus in language teaching.15

  4.2.3 Internet as potential corpora16

  4.2.4 Obstacles that prevent corpus usage in ESL learning and teaching.16

  4.3 Implications17

Chapter 5 Conclusion-19

5.1 Major findings-19

5.2 Limitations and Future Study-19

References-21

Acknowledgments-22

APPENDIX I.23