The Effectiveness of Corpus-Assisted Approach in Learning Grammatical Collocations of Thai Undergraduate Students in an EFL Classroom

Abstract

The present study implements a corpus-assisted approach with data-driven learning (DDL) in the EFL classroom to investigate its effectiveness in learning target grammatical collocations (verb-, adjective-, and noun-preposition collocations) of Thai undergraduate students and to examine the extent to which the students incorporate the collocational knowledge learned into their writing. Forty students who were inexperienced in DDL in one intact class at a private university in southern Thailand participated in this study. The participants learned through scaffolded paper-based DDL and autonomous computer-based DDL for a total of 10 weeks in an English for Communication course, which aims to develop their communicative abilities. Pre- and post-writing tests, a stimulated recall interview, and a semi-structured interview were employed as the data collection instruments. The writing test results indicate that the participants’ collocational knowledge significantly improved in all patterns (p = 0.00), with a large overall effect size (d = 1.26). The interview results uncover that most participants could accurately: 1) classify the types of the target collocational patterns; 2) identify the hidden usage of the content words with varying prepositions; and 3) elucidate some key considerations when using collocations for their written communication. The results also suggest that the participants have acquired several collocations other than those targeted in DDL. The study concludes with pedagogical implications for DDL implementation and limitations in conducting DDL lessons.