The Effect of Corpus-Based Instruction on Iranian EFL Learners' Writing Performance: The Case of Subordinate Clauses

Over the past decades, English corpora have undeniably established itself as an invaluable language teaching and learning tool which researchers/teachers, and learners alike have heavily drawn upon. In teaching academic writing, such a handy tool is crucially significant especially if we take into consideration the massive amounts of authentic target language input available now in electronic format. Such a repository would allow teachers to help learners to develop a far better understanding of the nature of written English and, in so doing, making them more proficient in using the target language. Considering this necessity, the present study aims to investigate the role of corpus-based instruction on EFL learners’ writing performance. The participants were ۶۲ upper-intermediate EFL learners (۲۷ males and ۳۵ females) majoring in English translation at the University of Velayat. To ensure the homogeneity of the participants, a Key English Test was run. The learners were randomly assigned into two groups, namely the experimental group and the control group. The experimental group mainly received authentic online language input for ۱۵ sessions in the form of sentence examples in the context of electronic format of news articles of quality newspapers whereas the control group received traditional ways of writing instruction. A writing assignment was used as a pre-test and post-test. Finally, a t-test was carried out to investigate the differences in mean scores between pre and post-test of the groups. The results of the study indicate that the experimental group, which received a corpus-based authentic input outperformed the control group, which received instruction traditionally.

کلیدواژه ها:

Corpus-Based Instruction ، EFL Learners ، Writing Performance