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Article published In:
Learner Corpus Research for Pedagogical Purposes
Edited by Sandra Götz and Sylviane Granger
[International Journal of Learner Corpus Research 10:1] 2024
► pp. 107–145

Using learner corpus data for grammatical accuracy development in written productions

The role of corrective feedback

 | Sorbonne Université – CELISO (UR7332)
 | Sorbonne Université – CELISO (UR7332)
 | Le CNAM – FOAP (EA7529)
This study investigates the differential effect of various noticing activities on grammatical accuracy development in EFL learners’ written productions. We focus on different types of noticing activities based on an error-tagged learner corpus and report on effective practical experiments involving learner corpus data. A pretest/posttest quasi-experimental design is used with three experimental groups (receiving different treatments) and one control group. Error frequencies, at both group and individual levels, and proportions of learners producing errors on three specific error types (articles, verb tense, verb agreement) are compared. Our results suggest that accuracy in the use of articles and verb agreement could be more easily fostered through the comparison of learner output with native data (the BNC, in our case). As for verb tenses, the impact of a more traditional form of corrective feedback seems greater while the use of online machine translation tools does not seem to foster much accuracy development.
Keywords: data-driven learning, learner corpus, error annotation, focus on form, corrective feedback, noticing, task-based language teaching
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Corrective feedback and data-driven learning
    • 2.1Classroom DDL and L2 research
    • 2.2Methodological considerations
    • 2.3Research questions
  • 3.Data and methodology
    • 3.1Learner corpus data
    • 3.2Data collection procedure
    • 3.3Data annotation
    • 3.4Measures
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Corpus size
    • 4.2Evolution of error frequencies (per number of words) at the group level
      • 4.2.1Overall error frequencies at the group level
      • 4.2.2Error frequencies per error type at the group level
    • 4.3Evolution of error frequencies at the individual level
      • 4.3.1Evolution of overall error frequencies per learner
      • 4.3.2Evolution of the proportion of learners producing errors
      • 4.3.3Evolution of error frequencies per error type per learner
        • Articles
        • Verb agreement
        • Verb tense
      • 4.3.4Comparison of the proportions of learners producing fewer grammatical errors
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 28 June 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijlcr.00042.sar
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