Corpora in the EFL classroom : exploring the effects of data driven learning (DDL)‎ on Iraqi EFL freshmen's grammatical development

الملخص EN

The advantages of using corpora directly in English grammar teaching and learning can be enormous, for it exposes learners to authentic text and authentic instances of actual language use.

The direct application of corpora in the classroom can be done through Data Driven Learning approach (DDL).

Through this approach students make use of concordances and try to discover by themselves the rules and patterns of a given grammatical item or word; shifting the way of the learning process to a more inductive and implicit learning style.

The access to DDL activities can be of two types: 1.

The immediate hand-on concordance for advanced learners and 2.

Paper-based activities prepared by teachers in advance for lower level learners.

Accordingly this study focused on the latter since immediate corpus data might be quite overwhelming for freshmen Iraqi EFL learners at their beginning stages of learning.

Forty-five Iraqi freshmen learners participated in the study all of them studying English as their major at the English Department/ college of Arts / al-Qadisiyah University.

The study lasted for only two weeks and adopted the four-step procedure developed by Chujo and Ophidian, ( 2008 ) : ( step 1)Hypothesis formation, (step 2) extensive teacher-student discussions, (step 3) homework activities and ( step 4 ) inside class activities.

In addition a questionnaire was conducted by the researcher in order to explore learners' attitudes and opinions towards the implementation of DDL activities on teaching grammar.

The analysis of students' responses on the DDL activities and the statements of the questionnaire revealed very positive findings concerning the use of DDLactivities inside the EFL classroom.