Using Language Corpora to Develop a Virtual Resource Center for Business English

A Virtual Resource Center (VRC) has been brought into use since 2008 as an integral part of a task-based language teaching and learning program for Business English courses at Nantes University, France. The objective of the center is to enable students to work autonomously and individually on their language problems so as to improve their language skills. We are currently developing the center by applying the theory of Data-Driven Learning, (DDL, Johns, 1991), with the hope to encourage more students' engagement in the center. This paper will describe how micro-tasks have been designed based on DDL theory and integrated to the VRC in order to help learners overcome their grammar problems. The researcher will follow the activities on the VRC of a group of 30 students over six weeks in order to raise students' awareness about the VRC and encourage them to work on their grammar problems on the center. The expected outcome is that students will engage more in the VRC and through a series of processing stages, i.e. thinking and reasoning, solving problems and making decisions, and regular practice, information can be transferred to the long-term memory to be retrieved in the future (Ellis, 2008). [For full proceedings, see ED564162.]