ABSTRACT
This study explores the initial reactions to corpora of two Year 5 L1 primary school students in Australia as they write argumentative essays in a private tutoring setting. Both students have similar language and cultural backgrounds but different learning preferences and ICT support at school. The students were instructed to revise lexical errors in their writing using Sketch Engine for Language Learning (SkELL) and the British Academic Corpus of Written English (BAWE) over a period of a month. The tutor provided scaffolded help while taking observational notes, screenshots of the students’ queries and search results, and interviews following each session. Continued use of the corpus helped improve students’ self-efficacy as they incorporated DDL techniques into their revision practice, although there was significant individual variation in their initial reaction to and use of SkELL across the revision sessions. Both students were positive about using corpora by the end of the training, suggesting primary school students are receptive to direct DDL when sufficient scaffolding is provided.
