Teaching ESP Through Data-Driven Learning: An Exploratory Study in Health Sciences Degrees

Abstract

Learning through linguistic corpora, also called data-driven learning or DDL (Johns, 1991), is an approach towards the teaching of foreign languages in which students discover the behaviour of a language through specific corpus-analytic tools. Being an inductive, student-centred methodology, DDL has proved to have numerous applications in the field of English for Specific Purposes (ESP), among which is the learning of both specialized vocabulary and collocations. This research, which results from an educational innovation project, generally seeks to improve the teaching of ESP in the area of Health Sciences through DDL, and it particularly hinges on the exploration of the learners’ perceptions and attitudes towards this approach. This study first describes the DDL classroom methodology designed and then details the results obtained from a questionnaire completed by 262 participants who were asked to evaluate DDL in terms of the difficulty and usefulness of the tool used, the methodology in the classroom, and its advantages and applications for ESP learning. Overall, the best-rated aspects of DDL were, among others, learning autonomy, the role of the teacher as a guide, its usefulness for learning specialized terminology, and its potential for authentic reading practice and observing a word’s behaviour in context.