Lexical Awareness and Development through Data Driven Learning: Attitudes and Beliefs of EFL Learners

Abstract

Data-driven learning (DDL) has become an innovative approach developed from corpus linguistics. It plays a significant role in the progression of foreign language pedagogy, since it offers learners plentiful authentic corpora examples that make them analyze language rules with the help of online corpora and concordancers. The present study attempts to reveal Turkish EFL learners’ attitudes and beliefs about DDL instruction in terms of lexical awareness and development. A mixed method including a questionnaire and a focus group interview was used to gather data. The statistical analysis of the results indicated positive attitudes towards DDL instruction in terms of raising the depth of lexical awareness particularly for synonyms and collocations. However, participants reported that their awareness towards word frequency, idioms and vocabulary learning strategies did not increase satisfactorily. Negative attitudes were also observed due to technical problems of the software and time-consuming nature of doing tasks through corpus.