In late August, I attended the 25th annual conference of EUROCALL (European Association for Computer Assisted Language Learning) at the University of Southampton. This year’s theme encompassed how Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) responds to changing global circumstances, which impact on education. Over 240 sessions were presented covering the topics of computer mediated communication, MOOCs, social networking, corpora, European projects, teacher education, etc.

 At this conference, I presented a poster entitled “Evaluating the effect of data-driven learning (DDL) on the acquisition of academic collocations by advanced Chinese learners of English”. DDL is a term created by Tim Johns in 1991 to refer to the use of authentic corpus data to conduct student-centred discovery learning activities. However, even though many corpus-based studies in the pedagogical domain have suggested applying corpora in the domain of classroom teaching, DDL has not become the mainstream teaching practice to date. Therefore, my research sets out to examine the contribution of DDL to the acquisition of academic collocation in the Chinese university context.

The corpus tool that I used in my research was #LancsBox (http://corpora.lancs.ac.uk/lancsbox/), which is a newly-developed corpus tool at CASS that has the capacity to create collocational networks, i.e. GraphColl. The poster I presented was a five-week pilot study of my research, the results of which show that the learners’ attitudes towards using #LancsBox were mostly positive, but there were no statistically significant differences between using the corpus tool and online collocations dictionary, which may be largely due to very short intervention time in the pilot study. My poster also presented the description of the forthcoming main study that will involve longer exposure and more EFL learners.

At this conference I was fortunate enough to win the EUROCALL2017 Best Poster Award (PhD), which was given to the best poster presented by a PhD student as nominated by conference delegates. Thank you to all of the delegates who voted for me to win this award and it was a real pleasure to attend such a wonderful conference!