Building language and genre awareness through learner corpus data in a second language writing course

Abstract

This study is part of a larger project investigating the impact of corpusbased teaching in a series of second language (L2) genre-based writing courses. In this paper, we focus on activities that were implemented in one L2 writing course between first and final drafts of two major assignments (a Literacy Narrative and a Genre Analysis). Materials were created using Crow (Corpus and Repository of Writing; https://crow.corporaproject.org) and designed to interact with an existing genre-based curriculum. Findings show modest but clear changes by students who interacted with the corpusbased materials. We also discuss our use of learner corpora, which departs somewhat from previous literature, including an asset-based approach where learners’ texts are used as models for other learners.