Paper short abstract:

We showed that the degree of awareness of a grammatical item affects created sentences in autonomous data-driven learning. We propose to show information about the context of the reading materials and to add the learners' corpus examples to the web tool for a better understanding of the usage.

Paper long abstract:

In the present study, we showed that the degree of awareness of a grammatical item affects created sentences in autonomous data-driven learning (DDL). To do so, we used a web tool as a preparation for an intermediate reading class.

DDL is a method of language learning that involves discovering the feature of the target language through consulting corpora for example sentences. Studies have shown the effects of DDL as discovery learning, whereas other studies have indicated that learners in the lower-level class face difficulty in using the corpus effectively.

Therefore, in this study I ask the learners to consult the web tool HAGOROMO— a web tool for function words in Japanese—which provides information on Japanese words as regards their meaning, explanation of usage, examples from learner corpus and so forth, instead of a concordancer. The students were asked to define the meaning of three grammatical items per unit of the textbook, create three sentences per item using HAGOROMO, and upload to the on-campus learning management system before each lesson.

The findings from Hori (2019) indicate that if learners created incorrect or incomplete sentences, their post-mortem grammar judgment test performed poorly. Some sentences were copied and pasted from HAGOROMO's examples, but it was unclear why students did this.

In this study, I conducted a questionnaire to ask learners how well they knew and understood the grammatical items before preparing for the class.

The findings revealed the following: a) if the learners had not known the grammatical items before the preparation, there was a tendency to copy and paste or partly rewrite the examples from the web tool and b) if the learners had known the grammatical items, most of the sentences produced were original.

In summary, a degree of awareness of grammatical items affects sentence creation, thus it is not enough for students to merely engage in autonomous DDL before lessons. We propose countermeasures such as showing information about the context of the reading materials and adding the learners' corpus examples to HAGOROMO so that they can better understand the usage of the items.