Explicit instruction in lexical units, particularly in academic writing courses via corpus-based learning, is of critical import to learners’ language proficiency. This session presents the results of a study on the effectiveness of COCA to improve students’ lexical collocation competence and academic writing proficiency while exploring the lexical-and-writing proficiency interrelationship.
Integrating a lexical approach in writing courses may help English for Academic Purposes (EAP) learners achieve greater fluency similar to that of native English writers, who are said to automatically incorporate collocations in their written texts. Pursuing such understandings, this study set out to investigate the effects explicit instruction can have on improving the lexical collocational competence and writing performance of EAP students. The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) was selected as the primary source of data collection, the largest freely-available corpus of American English long considered an effective tool in promoting English language learners’ collocational competence. The study further investigates whether or not collocational competence and writing performance have a linear relationship, especially when explicit lexical collocational instruction is implemented through COCA. The participants were sixteen international students who were preparing for graduate study by completing a semester EAP course. They all received basic training on the use of the corpus interface, were periodically assigned to analyze the lexical collocations used in academic papers, and methodically searched for collocations in COCA to write their own academic research papers. To understand how collocations are used naturally in speech or writing, participants were encouraged to strategically use COCA with a purpose and for a purpose. Pre- and post-tests were conducted to measure participants’ lexical competence and writing performance. A dependent t-test was computed to measure differences in performance and, furthermore, the Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient was computed to identify the perceived correlation between lexical competence and writing performance. The results showed that when students were provided with explicit instruction on how to maximize COCA in identifying lexical collocations and their pragmatic use, both their lexical collocational competence and writing performance improved significantly and, moreover, these improvements correlated with one another. Implications for teaching are also presented and discussed. Handouts provided.
