Getting the corpus habit: EAP students’ long-term use of personal corpora

• Forty graduate academic writing students built personal corpora.
• One year after the course 70% still used their corpus.
• Thirty-eight percent were regular users (1/week or more); 33% irregular users (1/month or less).
• Ninety-three percent of users thought using their corpus helped improve their writing.
• Long-term corpus use depends on individual writing processes and writing concerns.

This paper reports on the long-term use of personal do-it-yourself corpora by students of EAP. Forty international graduate students attended a course in which they built and examined their own corpora of research articles in their field. One year after the course, they completed an email questionnaire, which asked about their corpus use in the 12 months since the end of the course. Results show that 70% of the respondents had used their corpus: 38% were regular users (once per week or more), 33% irregular users (once per month or seldom) and 30% non-users. Most users consulted the corpus for checking grammar and lexis while composing and revising and 93% of them considered that corpus use had improved their academic writing. Reasons for non-use included the small size of the corpus and its lack of reliability and convenience. Case studies of a user and a non-user are presented and highlight two other factors likely to affect take-up: the individual’s writing process and the focus of their current writing concerns. The paper discusses the reasons behind long-term use of personal corpora and some of the challenges to be overcome in extending the approach more widely.