Learner Corpora and embedded assessment of undergraduate EFL writing: the case of metadiscourse markers

The present contribution discusses how a learner corpus can be used to identify learning gaps and plan assessments embedded in teaching and learning activities both inside and outside of the classroom. The learner corpus under investigation is a collection of opinion articles written by undergraduate students with English as a foreign language. A concordancer software was used to generate frequency lists from this collection and perform related searches. A first look at the list of the most frequent n-grams prompted us to consider specific clusters, which seem to relate to the organisation dimension of writing and the use of so-called ‘metadiscourse’. A closer look at the concordance lines and the collocates for these clusters elicited initial “writing questions,” such as “what patterns of co-occurrence can be found for the search terms?” and “what is the role of these patterns in topic development and argument building?” These same questions can be passed on to the students as part of hands-on activities aimed at encouraging observation, such as short guided searches on the learner corpus, related searches on reference corpora and other learner corpora, and learning logs based on these searches. Ultimately, a learner corpus can be employed to generate continuous formative assessment (including peer- and self-assessment), thus providing students with feedback for improvement and at the same time encouraging them to reflect on their own learning process.