A – Innovative Methods and Practices of Academic Writing and Writing Instruction
Presentation “LIKE A BLESSING FOR INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS”: INDEPENDENT LONG-TERM USE OF DO-IT-YOURSELF CORPORA Maggie Charles Oxford University Language Centre, Oxford, United Kingdom This paper reports on the long-term effects of a course on academic writing, in which students built individual ‘do-it-yourself’(DIY) corpora of research articles in their field and used them to explore the discourse of their own discipline (Lee and Swales 2006). I first give details of the 6-week, 12-hour course and then report 5 years of questionnaire data on 144 respondents who took the course between 2009 and 2013 and were surveyed one year later. Participants were graduates from many different socio-cultural backgrounds, studying in a wide range of disciplinary contexts. The aim of the study was to investigate the nature and extent of independent corpus use and the attitudes to corpus consultation that prevailed over the longer term. Results showed that 91 students (63%) continued to use their corpus one year after the end of the course and 52 users (56%) consulted their corpus frequently (once per week or more). The vast majority of users, 83 (91%), considered that using their corpus improved their academic writing. These data indicate that students see their corpus as a valuable resource that they can access independently to support their writing. The use of DIY corpora thus helps satisfy not only the immediate, but also the on-going writing needs of international students, which often continue long after the end of their EAP courses. I conclude by arguing for the greater use of DIY corpora in academic writing classes, where they offer a freely available technological resource of great benefit.
References
Lee, D., and Swales, J. (2006) A Corpus-Based EAP Course for NNS Doctoral Students: Moving from Available Specialized Corpora to Self-Compiled Corpora. English for Specific Purposes 25 (1), 56–75
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