The study aims to establish some tentative principles to develop corpus-based courses by investigating undergraduate students' perception of a corpus-based ESP course. A mixed-methods approach was applied and data from multiple sources were analysed to explore students' autonomous corpus consultation and perceived usefulness of corpora.
There have been only a handful of studies that investigated how corpora can be used as tools to facilitate learner autonomy in dealing with various specialized corpora (Charles, 2012; 2014; Crosthwaite, Wong, & Cheung, 2019; Lee & Swales, 2006). The presentation reports on a study that extends earlier research by analysing undergraduate students' perceived usefulness of corpora and corpus use for autonomous language learning after a corpus-based ESP course. The study investigated 1) how learners perceive corpus use in general; 2) whether learners used their DIY corpora autonomously after the courses; 3) whether learners used online corpora and corpus analysis tools autonomously after the course. The study applied a mixed-methods approach. Data was collected by focus group interviews, by the analysis of written student reports and questionnaires five months after the end of the course. Overall, findings show that as a result of the course students found corpora very useful. They considered corpora helpful not only for the purposes of the corpus-based ESP course, but they saw long-term potential in corpus use for language learning. Based on the results tentative principles of design and implementation of corpus-based ESP courses are proposed for future syllabus design with direct corpus use and DIY corpora.
