Autonomous corpus use by graduate students: a long-term trend study (2009–2017)

Corpus use by EAP students has reportedly increased over the last decade, with considerable optimism about the future of this approach (Chen & Flowerdew, 2018a). However, much research employs data from short classroom courses; little is known about how student corpus use has varied over a span of multiple years. This paper uses long-term trend data from a corpus-based course for graduates which ran 50 times (2009–2017) at a UK university. The course taught students to build do-it-yourself corpora based on their research topic and promoted autonomous consultation of this resource. Questionnaires on corpus use were administered at three stages: pre-course (544 students), immediate post-course (343) and delayed post-course, after one year (221). The data show that pre-course corpus use was constant (mean 24%), while immediate post-course use (mean 87%) and delayed post-course use rose only slightly (mean 62%) from 2009 to 2017. The lack of appreciable growth in corpus use over nine years does not support the expectation of increased take-up in future. However, the means for regular autonomous use (≥1/week) at 61% (immediate post-course) and 37% (delayed post-course), show the success of the do-it-yourself corpus approach in fostering the autonomous use of corpora by graduates.