Recycling the data : Building and using a learner business English writing corpus

• This paper describes the construction and use of a small corpus of business English writing by Swedish university students to form the basis of a "learning driven data" (Seidlhofer, 2002) approach to their studies in business writing. Course assignments were used to construct a small corpus which was analysed from a lexical perspective in relation to the Business Service List (BSL) (Browne & Culligan, 2016) and an online Business Letter Corpus (BLC) to identify errors and gaps in knowledge. The findings were then used to inform course content and form the basis for tasks using the learner corpus, which will be integrated into the course structure to provide opportunities for data-driven learning. This study contributes to the growing number of pedagogic applications of learner corpora, demonstrating an approach that could be adapted to a range of other learning contexts.

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