Implementing disciplinary data-driven learning for postgraduate thesis writing

Abstract

This chapter reviews the literature on Data-driven learning (DDL) teaching for postgraduates, describes the design and functionality of the corpus and development of accompanying DDL materials. The corpus served to raise students’ language awareness and it helped weaker students with grammar, vocabulary, tone and coherence. The chapter evaluates students’ and teachers’ perceptions of using the resources and discusses implications for enhancing postgraduate thesis writing using the DDL approach. There are a number of major benefits of DDL for language learning. The form-focus and bottom-up processing of DDL reflects second language acquisition research findings and is pedagogically relevant to information technology-oriented modern learners. There has been little research focusing on DDL with postgraduates and fewer even for disciplinary writing. The DDL materials come after relevant language features, content and rhetorical devices are introduced, after critical analysis and discussion of various texts or drafting practice, and aim to raise students’ awareness of the key features of successful disciplinary writing.