Modeling expression of the research gap in text-based reading instruction: A corpus-based approach

This small-scale intervention aimed to prepare students to express a particular academic writing feature (the research gap) through a structured intervention in corpus reading tasks. Four undergraduate (second year) students majoring in English education participated in a collaborative corpus-based analysis of selected published articles. They then drew on the corpus exemplars to develop their own gap statements. Data were collected from focus group interviews, students’ learning journals, and learning artifacts. There were two key findings. First, the students indicated that corpus-based analysis helped them become critical readers to recognize lexis used to show the research gap in the corpus-based database. Secondly, students learned from the collocation patterns in the corpus to express the research gap in their own contexts. The study has practical implications for language teaching demonstrating how corpus-based text-based language teaching can be a catalyst for students to become active and critical meaning makers.