The BAWE Quicklinks Project: A New DDL Resource for University Students

• Published in: Lidil no. 58
• Main Authors: Vincent, Benet, Nesi, Hilary
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: UGA Éditions/Université Grenoble Alpes 06.11.2018
• Subjects: hyperliens; data-driven learning (DDL); linguistique du corpus; phraséologie; corpus linguistics; rétroaction écrite; written feedback; hyperlinks; phraseology
• ISSN: 1146-6480; 1960-6052
• DOI: 10.4000/lidil.5306

This paper outlines a new initiative aimed at integrating concordances and other corpus outputs into written feedback for learners of English for Academic Purposes (EAP). Although data-driven learning has by now a 30-year history, it has yet to have a great impact on mainstream pedagogy despite various claims regarding its efficacy and its benefits in terms of promoting learner autonomy. This situation may be due to technical barriers to the use of corpora in teaching, in particular the apparent complexity of most corpus interfaces to the uninitiated. We seek to circumvent these barriers by creating concordances to help students address their written errors. These concordances, found in the free-to-use British Academic Written English corpus, are made available as hyperlinks pasted into student work to help them address their errors by giving them direct access to instances of proficient academic writing. This paper will outline the methods used to create the concordances, the types of writing issues that are most amenable to this treatment and some initial student feedback on the first phase of an ongoing project to identify and categorise typical phraseological problems in student writing.