This study investigates the influence of using corpus technology in L2 academic writing, the effects of this technolgy on language learning and approaches to L2 writing, and also, its individual experiences and contextual factors. It attempts to emphasize that the corpus approach not only can enhance learners’ awareness of lexico-grammatical patterning of texts, but also can foster inductive learning. The context was presented between students that come from a graduate-level advanced ESL academic writing course of the Dongguk University, Korea, but the researchers was focused in 6 cases, students from different nationalities, which four students were majoring in science-related fields (one in combined science and education); one was in education; and the other one in the humanities. The students received a course that was given by a veteran ESL professor; this course contained ten weeks, twice a week, and two and a half hour per day. After that process, the participants were interviewed approximately once every two weeks for an hour during the first quarter. Results did show that there are big differences between their fields of study; three of them just use the corpus for class writing assignments, while the others did not; another factor presented that the science majors students may have had less need for writing in their courses, and the three non-science majors students likely to require more writing and a wider variety of styles.
http://llt.msu.edu/vol12num2/yoon.pdf
