This paper describes the development of web-based software at a university in Spain to help students of EFL self-correct their free-form writing. The software makes use of an eighty-million-word corpus of English known to be correct as a normative corpus for error correction purposes. It was discovered that bigrams (two-word combinations of words)…

Studies on students' use of corpora in L2 writing have demonstrated the benefits of corpora not only as a linguistic resource to improve their writing abilities but also as a cognitive tool to develop their learning skills and strategies. Most of the corpus studies, however, adopted either direct use or indirect use of corpora by students,…

This study illustrates how a synergy of two technologies--Intelligent Computer-Assisted Language Learning (ICALL) and corpus linguistic analysis--can produce a lasting improvement in L2 learners' ability to edit persistent grammatical errors from their writing. A large written English corpus produced by Korean undergraduate and graduate…

This study focuses on the computer-aided analysis of interlanguage errors made by the participants in the telematic simulation IDEELS (Intercultural Dynamics in European Education through on-Line Simulation). The synchronous and asynchronous communication analysed was part of the MiLC Corpus, a multilingual learner corpus of texts written by…

This study explores the potential for automated indices related to speech delivery, language use, and topic development to model human judgments of TOEFL speaking proficiency in second language (L2) speech samples. For this study, 244 transcribed TOEFL speech samples taken from 244 L2 learners were analyzed using automated indices taken from…

Culture has long been seen as a fundamental component of language learning. While its importance is universally recognized, there is no consensus on what the term encompasses, how culture should be integrated into language instruction, or on what role technology can and should play in that process. In this column, we will be looking at the latter…

This paper adopts an automated frequency-driven approach to identify frequently-used word combinations (i.e., "lexical bundles") in academic writing. Lexical bundles retrieved from one corpus of published academic texts and two corpora of student academic writing (one L1, the other L2), were investigated both quantitatively and qualitatively.…

The advance of digital video technology in the past two decades facilitates empirical investigation of learning in real time. The focus of this paper is the combined use of real-time digital video and a networked linguistic corpus for exploring the ways in which these technologies enhance our capability to investigate the cognitive process of…

In much of the literature on the exploitation of corpora for language learning, the learners are viewed as researchers, who formulate and test their own hypotheses about language use. Having identified difficulties encountered in corpus investigations by our intermediate-level students of Italian in a previous study, we have designed a…

This paper describes a corpus-based approach to teaching and learning spoken grammar for English for Academic Purposes with reference to Bhatia's (2002) multi-perspective model for discourse analysis: a textual perspective, a genre perspective and a social perspective. From a textual perspective, corpus-informed instruction helps students identify…

This paper discusses the use of a web-based concordancing program using an interface design similar to the one used at the MICASE concordancing site to help students appropriately choose reporting verbs. Appropriate reporting verbs are important for asserting credible claims in academic papers. An interface was created that asked the students to…

Although corpora have been used in language teaching for some time, few empirical studies explore their impact on learning outcomes. We provide a microgenetic account of learners' responses to corpus-driven instructional units for German modal particles and pronominal "da"-compounds. The units are based on developmental corpus data produced by…

This study investigates the performance of a spell checker designed for native writers on misspellings made by second language (L2) learners. It addresses two research questions: 1) What is the correction rate of a generic spell checker for L2 misspellings? 2) What factors influence the correction rate of a generic spell checker for L2…

In the author's piece "Computing the Demands of Vocabulary Acquisition from Reading" ("Language Learning & Technology," October, 2007), he argued that building an adequate functional L2 lexicon for reading from reading alone cannot be done by the majority of learners in the normal time frame of instructed L2 learning. An example of such a time…

This paper reports on a qualitative study that investigated the changes in students' writing process associated with corpus use over an extended period of time. The primary purpose of this study was to examine how corpus technology affects students' development of competence as second language (L2) writers. The research was mainly based on case…