Exploring the levels of acceptance and motivation towards the use of corpora in EFL classesa case study with B1+ university students

Résumé

University students of English are expected to acquire new vocabulary and put it into practice in a natural way, similarly to the way native speakers would use it. They have traditionally been given this vocabulary, drilled with it and expected to reproduce it. The objective of this case study is to introduce them to the use of linguistic corpora in vocabulary sessions, and test their level of acceptance and motivation towards such tools. Two groups of Translation and Interpreting students (second year), whose level of English is B1+, took part in two vocabulary workshops, a traditional and a corpus-based one, using hits from News on the Web (NOW) corpus (Davies 2018) and a ‘reverse’ or onomasiological strategy. After each of these workshops was finished, they answered a questionnaire about four major topics: ‘motivation/interest’, ‘usefulness/applicability’, ‘novelty/contents’ and ‘materials/timing’. Despite the difficulty most of them found in the use of this tool owing to its newness, the results showed a high level of acceptance, very similar to that of those traditional ways of learning vocabulary. This indicates that the use of a linguistic corpus could be a very interesting tool to foster peer-to-peer interaction, motivational attitudes, syntactic understanding, and of course, vocabulary acquisition.