Exploiting a genre-specific corpus in ESP writing: students’ preferences and strategies

The purpose of this study is to gain greater understanding of effective approaches to data-driven learning (DDL) in ESP writing courses. To achieve this, it investigates student corpus users’ preferences for learning genre-appropriate phraseology and the corpus-informed strategies they adopt to exploit this phraseology in their writing. The study compares the phraseology in two learner corpora consisting of texts written by 118 university students. The texts in the first learner corpus were written before DDL intervention, while those in the second corpus were produced in an end-of-course exam following use of DDL tasks informed by a genre-specific corpus. An initial analysis considers whether the phraseology encountered in paper-based or computer-based DDL activities was more productive in the students’ writing. Questionnaire responses are then analyzed to reveal the types of DDL tasks that students preferred and the corpus-informed strategies that they used while writing their exam texts. These include memorizing phrases encountered in DDL tasks, consulting the ESP corpus during the exam to check previously encountered phraseology, and looking up new phrases in the corpus during the exam. The implications of the results of this study for DDL strategy training and materials development to enhance students’ writing skills are discussed.