The effects of using corpora on revision tasks in L2 writing with coded error feedback

Abstract

This study reports on the results of classroom research investigating the effects of corpus use in the process of revising compositions in English as a foreign language. Our primary aim was to investigate the relationship between the information extracted from corpus data and how that information actually helped in revising different types of errors in the essays. In 'data-driven learning', previous research has often failed to provide rigorous criteria for choosing the words or phrases suitable for correction with corpus data. By investigating the above relationship, this study aims to clarify what should be corrected by looking at corpus data. 93 undergraduate students from two universities in Tokyo wrote a short essay in 20 minutes without a dictionary, and the instructors gave coded error feedback for two lexical or grammatical errors. They deliberately selected one error which should be appropriate for checking against corpus data and one that was more likely to be corrected without using any reference resource. Three weeks later, a short hands-on instruction of the corpus query tool was given, followed by revision activities in which the participants were instructed to revise their first drafts, with or without the tool depending on the codes given to each error. 188 errors were automatically classified into three different categories (omission, addition and misformation) using natural language processing techniques. All words and phrases tagged for errors were further annotated for part-ofspeech (POS) information. The results show that there was a significant difference in the accuracy rate among the three error types when the students consulted the corpus: omission and addition errors were easily identified and corrected, whereas misformation errors were low in correction accuracy. This reveals that certain errors are more suitable for checking against corpus data than others.

Modes of feedback in ESL writing: Implications of shifting from text to screencast

“…A few studies have investigated text-based feedback with additional affordances such as the use of Markin (a Windows-based tool that allows for inserting of color-coded premade feedback codes in a short text) in Byrne's (2007), hyperlinked explanations as in Yeh and Lo's (2009) "Online Annotator for EFL Writing" or Gaskell and Cobb's (2004) premade hyperlinks to relevant concordance lines and tools bridging the feedback with corpus study and language tools. Others have employed basic features of electronic text feedback such as underlining and error coding for novel uses such as to prompt corpus use (Tono, Satake, & Miura, 2014). Further investigation into the incorporation of additional affordances may bring to light valuable resources for providing meaningful feedback to students on their writing.…”

Data-driven Learning in Second Language Writing Class: A Survey of Empirical Studies

“…In several studies, the general corpora were not provided directly to students but offered through an online link. Tono et al [22] introduced a publicly available online corpus query system IntelliText in which the students could consult ready-made corpora including the BNC. Compared with the direct use of BNC, IntelliText provided a more user-friendly interface where students were limited to search merely word or phrase levels.…”

“…These studies were mainly conducted by comparing the usefulness of different reference tools; however, Geluso [32] made a different comparison, which contrasted learners' initial Google-informed phrases vs final nonGoogle-informed phrases, suggesting that Google could be an effective reference tool to improve the naturalness of their productive language use. Unlike the above two streams of studies, Tono, et al [22] concerned about the effectiveness of DDL in correcting different types of errors in writing. In this study, students were required to consult corpora for correcting three types of lexico-grammatical errors in writing.…”

Exploring the Effectiveness of Combined Web-based Corpus Tools for Beginner EFL DDL

“…The benefits of the use of corpora and Data Driven Learning (DDL) have been well documented over the last two decades [21,24,33]. Through meta-analyses of DDL studies, it has been shown that DDL can be effective for learning EFL grammar and vocabulary [18,27].…”