Short-term Effects of Students’ Exploration of Corpora: A Longitudinal Study of Pre- and Post-modification of Noun Phrases in Learner English

An area that has not received a great deal of attention in the study of learner corpora and, indeed, is reportedly neglected in EFL grammars (Biber et al. 1994) and in English language teaching (Falinski 2011) is the structure and use of the noun phrase (NP). Learning how to correctly structure a noun phrase can be problematic for learners of English, and recognizing the phraseological behaviour of certain nouns in a specific register can be more difficult still. This study use a pre- /post-test approach to investigate use of complex noun phrases by 143 Italian students’ both before and after paper-based and hands on data-driven learning (DDL) activities. DDL tasks were based on an L1 corpus of self-presentation messages, and students’ use of noun phrases in two learner corpora of self-presentation messages (one produced at the start of the course and the other following the application of DDL tasks) were compared. The aim of this study is to see whether data-driven learning tasks DDL can influence awareness and use of lexico-grammatical structures in English.