Saudi EFL learners’ Perceptions of The Use of Corpora in Academic Writing Teaching

Abstract

The study explores Saudi EFL learners’ perceptions of the effect of applying corpus-based approach as a pedagogical approach on academic writing instruction. The purpose of the study is to evaluate students’ perspectives towards using corpus-based activities on their academic writing learning, more precisely, their lexico-grammatical abilities. In the study, seven female preparatory year students at an intermediate language proficiency level participated. Learners were asked to compose written tasks during three weeks using corpus tools. To explore learners’ attitudes, semi-structured interviews were conducted. The results of the interviews suggest that learners have positive attitudes towards the corpus-based approach to their academic writing performance. Based on the results of the interviews, four themes were found to be recurrent in learners’ responses, which are: Increasing Learners’ Confidence as EFL Writers, Fostering learners’ Language Awareness, Providing Availability of Input, and Promoting Learners’ Autonomy.