‘Off-the-peg' materials for data-driven learning.
Alex Boulton · HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe) · 2008
Considerable research over the last few years has shown that large electronic corpora can contribute to the major questions in foreign language teaching and learning of a) what to teach and b) how to teach it. For the “what” question, corpora can be used to provide information on frequency and patterns of form, meaning and use. For the “how” question, learners can be given access to corpora which they are encouraged to explore directly or indirectly in an approach known as data-driven learning or DDL. However, the “what” question has found its way into mainstream teaching practices, while the “how” question remains largely the preserve of individual researchers within a university environment. This imbalance is reflected in the different uptake by publishers: reference materials – dictionaries, grammars and usage manuals – and also in some cases textbooks increasingly claim to be corpus-informed or corpus-based, with more coverage of high frequency items, greater focus on usage, collocation and context, and the increased use of authentic examples taken from the corpora. On the other hand, there are remarkably few truly DDL materials available “off-the-peg” (i.e. ready for immediate use by regular teachers), whether on the market or on line, and DDL activities are completely absent from most major textbooks. In this paper, we begin by examining objections to DDL cited in various studies and reported by our own students, and find that they largely revolve around practical or technical concerns linked to direct interaction with the computer; sometimes, it seems, new technologies are not necessarily better. Paper-based materials might provide one partial solution, an approach adopted in several empirical studies summarised here, including work with our own learners. We argue that the increased availability of off-the-peg materials is likely to be crucial if DDL is to break out of its research confines and make substantial inroads into the wider teaching community. We therefore review various existing DDL materials, both published and on line, with particular consideration to their use by “non-specialist” users, whether teachers or learners. We discuss some of the advantages and disadvantages of creating general-purpose materials of this type, and finally present a number of steps needed to increase interest from publishers.