A Study on a Computer-Based Corpus Approach to College English Writing

This paper examines the effectiveness of a computer-based corpus approach to college English writing. The empirical study in this paper illustrates that the use of corpus does benefit college English writing but there are some problems in its application. Pedagogical implications are then provided to enhance the effective integration of corpus and college English Writing: 1) teachers and learners need to negotiate frequently during the whole process of corpus-based DDL; 2) corpus use in writing must adapt to the students’ needs and teaching environments; 3) the alternative use of corpus and dictionaries will enhance the efficiency of corpus-based learning of the students; 4) Integrating cooperative learning and DDL will promote college students’ writing greatly.