Using Corpus-Assisted Learning Activities to Assist Vocabulary Development in English

In recent years, the use of corpora has achieved increasing prominence for educational purposes in general, for second language vocabulary development in particular. To this end, the qualitative study reported in this article sought to find out learners’ perceptions related to the use of corpus assisted vocabulary learning activities in an EFL classroom. The study was carried out at an international high school in Istanbul, conveniently sampling 26 learners (16 male, 10 female). The learners were exposed to four unknown words for two classroom hours of activities prepared using a corpus program as in the literature (e.g., Thurstun & Candlin, 1998). Upon completion of the activities, data, first of all, came from a persona evaluation checklist. Then, reflection papers were collected, and at the end all learners interviewed. The qualitative data were transcribed and coded. The results showed that learners found corpus-assisted vocabulary learning activities interesting enough, identifying their thoughts with such expressions as “easy”, “fun”, “innovative”, “autonomous”, “practical”, but “complex”. Bearing all these results in mind, a series of implications are given and suggestions made for both language teachers and learners