Providing feedback on students’ writing in EFL classes with #LancsBox

Abstract

Teacher workloads, time constrains and high numbers of students in EFL classes do not always allow EFL teachers to be the only feedback providers, even though students expect such feedback to be frequent. Consequently, there is a great need for teachers to search for ways or innovative tools, such as applications (Rosmalen et al., 2013), to facilitate the process of feedback provision on students’ writing. Corpus-driven analysis of written texts might also serve as one of such tools in order to provide indirect feedback to higher proficiency (EFL or other foreign language) students and foster their ability to correct errors independently. Since data can be loaded and imported into #LancsBox, a software package developed at Lancaster University, it is a useful tool for a variety of purposes. In thisstudy, 53 “memorable trip” posts, written by Lithuanian students of upper-intermediate English, were taken from Moodle to form a mini-corpus and then imported into #LancsBox. Its concordance tool KWIC allows to search for words, phrases, and grammatical patterns. The tool was used with the aim to see what kind of information could be received and then provided to EFL students based on their written texts placed in the corpus. The search revealed certain spelling variations, common collocations and patterns. These and other findings can be used for positive and negative feedback, as a combination of both is highly supported by numerous previous studies (e.g. Zaman & Azad, 2012).