Evaluating language learners’ response to web-based, data-driven, genre teaching materials

Using the tools of corpus linguistics, genre analysts are now able to easily identify the common linguistic features of the moves and strategies of genres. Such analyses produce large amounts of linguistic data which must be presented to language learners in a meaningful context. One proposed method of doing so is by hyperlinking the data to form an HTML website which learners can browse. This paper aims to determine the effectiveness of such a website in an ESP/EAP classroom by evaluating job application letters written by 13 language learners before and after accessing the website. The results of the study show that learners were able to make significant gains in achieving their communicative goals by learning from the discourse structures and using the lexico-grammatical features found on the site. In addition, the learners were very positive in their evaluation of the website. The paper concludes that the website is an effective way of presenting the results of a detailed genre analysis to language learners.