From learner corpus to data-driven learning (DDL): Improving lexical usage in academic writing

Despite considerable discussion in the literature (Flowerdew & Peacock, 2001; Hyland, 1998; Tang, 2012) competent English academic writing is still a problem which needs to be solved. English for Academic Purposes (EAP) teaching often focuses on specialized lexis, which may, however, be the area where academic writers need least help. What may cause considerable difficulty, on the other hand, is lexical usage. The study of a small corpus of C2 level academic writing which consisted of the sub-genres of summary and discussion writing revealed that one key area which is problematic is collocation. This paper presents the results of this small corpus investigation into learner language and how it informed the classroom implementation of data-driven learning (DDL) to increase learner awareness of and ability to use collocations effectively in written academic English. The article briefly describes the corpus and the resulting teaching procedure adopted. The first step of this procedure is familiarization followed by experimentation using Sketch Engine's (SkeLL).