(How) do secondary school EFL writers benefit from corpus-based collocation learning? A study of usage, outcomes, and perceptions

This study investigates the effects of hands-on corpus consultation in a writing class for high school students on the accuracy of collocations used in their academic writing production. 24 Vietnamese high school students who participated in the study engaged in five ninety-minute corpus-training sessions. Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and SKELL were chosen as the main corpus tools. A mixed research method was employed, combining quantitative data with pre-test-and-post-test design and evaluation survey with qualitative data obtained from semi-structured interviews and videotapes recording students’ corpus consultation process. The results showed a mixed picture regarding the participants’ improvement in the quality of the verb-noun (V-N) collocations used in their essays, measured by the average MI scores and collocation error rates per 100 words, after five corpus-based training sessions. The study also found that there were differences between students who improved and those who did not improve in the way they utilized the corpus tools at different stages of their corpus consultation. The participants in general showed a positive attitude toward direct corpus consultation and the corpus-based lessons. The implications of the findings for academic writing pedagogy and the design of corpus-based lessons in EFL teaching context are discussed.