Enhancing student writing with do-it-yourself corpora on a PhD pre-sessional programme

Therova, Dana; McKay, Andrew

Abstract

As an effective writing course should focus on disciplines and their unique characteristics, practitioners of English for academic purposes (EAP) are often faced with the challenge of addressing the different needs of learners from various fields of study. This article reports on how a data-driven learning (DDL) approach can be applied to enhance student written production in a multidisciplinary classroom in a 10-week PhD pre-sessional programme at a British University. The participants were six international students who used a do-it-yourself (DIY) corpus in weekly DDL sessions to familiarize themselves with discipline-specific academic writing conventions and applying them in their writing. The effectiveness of this approach was investigated through a ‘talk around texts’ technique employed in semi-structured interviews with individual students and their supervisors on programme completion. The findings show that a DDL approach utilizing a DIY corpus has the potential of enhancing PhD student writing in a multidisciplinary classroom on a pre-sessional programme. This article suggests that DDL could be successfully implemented not only in PhD pre-sessional programmes, but also in wider EAP contexts.

Citation

Therova, D., & McKay, A. (in press). Enhancing student writing with do-it-yourself corpora on a PhD pre-sessional programme. Language Teaching Research, https://doi.org/10.1177/13621688231221350

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Nov 29, 2023
• Online Publication Date: Dec 29, 2023
• Deposit Date: Apr 2, 2024
• Publicly Available Date: Apr 2, 2024
• Journal: Language Teaching Research
• Print ISSN: 1362-1688
• Electronic ISSN: 1477-0954
• Publisher: SAGE Publications
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/13621688231221350
• Keywords: Linguistics and Language; Education; Language and Linguistics
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/2367678