Corpus based learning

About this website : This project aims to develop a corpus-based online learning system to help English majors at HKIED improve their academic writing by enhancing their ability to better understand the appropriate use of academic lexico-gr a mmatical items. The project involves compiling three distinctive corpora: (1) an English for Academic Purposes (EAP) Learner Corpus, (2) an EAP Corpus (collected from professional academic authors), and (3) a Chinese for Academic Purposes (CAP) Corpus. Data are collected respectively from undergraduate students’ English essays at HKIED, published international journal articles (SSCI) concerning language and education and similar articles in Chinese core journals. The three corpora will be analy s ed both individually and in combination in order to (a) identify students’ recurrent difficulties in using English lexico-grammatical items accurately and appropriately in the EAP Learner Corpus, (b) identify the possible sources of such difficulties by studying the differences and similarities of the relevant lexico-grammatical features in the three corpora , and (c) suggest possible remedies that may serve to reduce or eliminate such problems. The main finished product of this project will be a corpus-based online learning system that can enable students to study academic lexico-grammatical items in the three corpora and practiseusing such items through exercises designed by the team based on the corpus data collected in this study. Copyright © 2011 Department of English, the Hong Kong Institute of Education.