Hongmei Wu PhD Candidate Second Language Acquisition and Teaching American Association for Corpus Linguistics 2008 Conference (AACL) Provo, Utah March 12-15, 2008 “Corpus consultation in drafting and revising: A case study of a biomedical ESL graduate student”

The pedagogical benefits of introducing corpora to advanced ESL writers as a reference tool have been suggested in many corpus-based EAP/ESP studies. It has been argued that using corpora may help promote learner autonomy and data-driven, inductive learning as opposed to teacher-centered, rule-governed and deductive learning. However, empirical studies of these potential benefits are few, especially in the area of teaching academic writing to ESL graduate students, with only a few notable exceptions (e.g. Coniam, 2004; Lee & Swales, 2006). To have a close look at how corpus can be used to assist academic writing, the present study investigates an ESL graduate student’s experience of learning to consult a corpus when preparing a manuscript for publication. 40 journal articles in three key journals in his discipline of biomedical studies were compiled into a corpus, and the student was taught to search the corpus for a number of linguistic forms, such as tense in different sections, citation attribution, linguistic expressions for academic praise and criticism, and hedging devices in the corpus. He was then asked to refer to the corpus when drafting and revising his paper and kept a journal of his writing process. His first two drafts, along with comments from his lab mate and advisor and his journals, were collected and analyzed. Interviews were also conducted with the student. Initial data analyses indicate that corpus can be a very convenient tool, more relevant than dictionaries and grammar books, for finding collocations, consulting the use of modal verbs, and choosing other appropriate hedges and evaluative expressions. It is also found that by displaying word concordances in limited contexts, corpus consultation draws attention to linguistic forms (e.g. tenses) that tend to be overlooked when reading for information. In addition, it seems that corpus consultation has increased the participant’s confidence in writing. Practical constraints such as time investment on the part of the student were raised as an initial concern, but as the participant became familiar with the corpus, he could devise more efficient searches. Using an in-depth case study, this paper sheds light on the varied uses of a specialized corpus as a reference tool for graduate students.