An Investigation of Students’ Experiences with Corpus-based Approach on High School Students' English Paragraph Writing

บทคัดย่อ

          This research aims to (1) examine the effectiveness of Corpus-based Approach on students’ grammatical competence for writing narrative paragraphs, and (2) to examine students’ attitude towards using a Corpus-based Approach instructional material to improve upon the students’ paragraph writing skills. Thirty-four Grade 11 students are used as participants. The mixed-method research design is adopted in the present research. The instruments are as follows: (1) pre-writing and post-writing ability tests; (2) learner diaries; and (3) semi-structured interview.  Frequency, percentage, error analysis, and content analysis are adopted for data analysis.

          To examine the effectiveness of Corpus-based Approach on students’ grammatical competence for writing narrative paragraphs, the results reveals that the frequencies of the students’ grammatical errors found in the writing ability test (330) after learning are lower than the errors found in the writing ability test (504) before learning.  To examine students’ attitude towards using a Corpus-based Approach instructional material to improve upon the students’ paragraph writing skills, the learners’ diaries show students’ positive attitudes towards learning through Corpus-based Approach in writing classes and using corpus websites helped students to avoid committing grammatical writing and lexical errors. The results from the semi-structured interviews also indicate the benefits of corpus materials as it is beneficial for error corrections and developing the students’ English writing ability, grammatical writing ability, and vocabulary usage. The important findings from this research are that Corpus-based Approach can be an effective method for teaching writing, improving students’ grammatical ability and vocabulary knowledge.