Our research explores the search behaviour of EFL learners (n=24) by tracking their interaction with corpus-based materials during focus-on-form activities (Observe, Search the corpus, Rewriting). One set of learners made no use of web services other than the BNC during the central Search the corpus activity while the other set resorted to other web services and/or consultation guidelines. The performance of the second group was higher, the learners’ formulation of corpus queries on the BNC was unsophisticated and the students tended to use the BNC search interface to a great extent in the same way as they used Google or similar services. Our findings suggest that careful consideration should be given to the cognitive aspects concerning the initiation of corpus searches, the role of computer search interfaces, as well as the implementation of corpus-based language learning. Our study offers a taxonomy of learner searches that may be of interest in future research.

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Our research examines the use of general adverbs by learners across grades 5, 6, 9 and 10 in the International Corpus of Crosslinguistic Interlanguage (ICCI) by looking at whether this use increases with age. For our research we use data from the Polish, Spanish and Chinese components in the ICCI, in particular, those from the “food” and “money” topics. Our results show that general adverbs are more widely used as age increases. Statistically significant differences were found between grade 6 and 10 learners across all three L1 groups in terms of the frequency of use of general adverbs, which suggests that 10-graders integrate adverbs in their discourse in ways that differ from those in previous years. This study, together with Pérez-Paredes & Díez-Bedmar’s (2012), suggests that learners below grade 9 are more unlikely to use adverbs.

The research we report is a pilot study carried to test English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students’ reception of an electronic foreign language teaching (FLT) task. In doing so, our aim was to collect information that can allow us to refine our own e-skills model, a model that adapts to the specific learning context of our students by focusing on the objectives, competence, and learning activities that our students engage in, in their everyday learning experience. In this way, our e-skills model is field-specific and context-survey-driven. The factor analysis results suggest that, although our four-factor solution explains much of the variance, the original dimensions of e-skills in our FLT context should be reformulated and further adjusted.