Reflection on Data-driven Learning

It is well acknowledged that grammar teaching, which has long been regarded as one of the most important aspects of EFLT, bears serious problems.


Traditionally grammar is seen as a static product that consists of forms that are rule-governed, sentence-level, absolute, and constitute a closed system. However, grammar should be regarded as a dynamic process in which forms have meanings and uses in a rational, discursive, flexible, interconnected, and open system. In order to master the whole grammar system, students need to view grammar as an integration of morphosyntax, semantics and pragmatics, which can be called "dynamic grammar". With such a new conception of grammar, a new approach to grammar teaching is needed. Only with such a new approach can learners master the grammatical knowledge accurately, meaningfully, and appropriately. It is called DDL (data-driven learning).

DDL is defined by Johns as "the use in the classroom of computer-generated concordances to get students to explore regularities of patterning in the target language and the development of activities and exercises based on concordance output". He also describes his procedures of Identify-Classify-Generalize for classroom based concordance and data-driven learning. The basic idea of data-driven leaning can be summed up in the following points:

( i ) A focus on the exploitation of authentic materials even when dealing with tasks such as the acquisition of   grammatical structures and lexical items.
  
( ii ) A focus on real, exploratory tasks and activities rather than traditional "drill and kill" exercises.

( iii) A focus on learner-centered activities.

( iv ) A focus on the use and exploitation of tools rather than ready-made or off-the-shelf learn-ware.

In practical grammar teaching, the students should be divided into two groups: intermediate-advanced and low-level students. To some low-level students, teachers should try to prepare some simple data from corpora and design some clear and easy lead-in exercises for them. They can learn to observe the collocations of some key words and try to work out some simple rules by themselves. After consulting the data, students should get the chance to see the texts with full sentence structures, which will be better for beginners to learn to study with DDL. To some proficient students, teachers should try to offer learning data as many as possible. Sometimes, teachers can even encourage them to process data on their own by means of some concordancing softwares, thus they can get the chance to deal with real data in corpora.