This study investigates the effect of the DDL (Data-Driven Learning) approach on the English sentence writing ability of 6th graders in elementary school. To this end, a total of seven English textbooks were used to build a corpus. Five teachers were then asked to conduct five lessons using a weak version of DDL in their 6-grade EFL classrooms. Students were asked to complete a pre- and post-test and a pre- and post-survey, and a selected number of students and four of the five teachers had in-depth interviews with the researcher. The results are as follows: First, DDL using the textbook corpus was found to be adequate for helping elementary students improve their sentence-writing ability. Second, DDL had a significant effect on upper, middle, and lower level groups of students. Third, the students felt that DDL was neither unfamiliar nor difficult. Fourth, teachers with little teaching experience found it easy to conduct their classes using the DDL approach. This study implies that DDL is an effective approach to teaching communicative functions and language forms in the elementary English classroom and can be useful for all levels of elementary students.

The purpose of this study was to analyze six English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners’ trajectories of discriminating near-synonyms in a data-driven learning task. Since the learners find it considerably difficult to learn subtle meaning differences of near-synonyms, corpuscorpuscorpuscorpuscorpuscorpus-based data-driven learning may provide an opportunity for them to tackle their difficulties. The study materials guided the learners to identify the differences between the four pairs of near-synonyms, categorize the concordance lines based on their findings, and generalize the findings. The six participants had notably different trajectories of discriminating near-synonyms. The qualitative analysis of the trajectories showed a tendency that the intermediate learners focused on the meanings and found the correct answer without knowing the core meaning, and the advanced learners moved further to attend to structural differences and sometimes tested their previous knowledge on the concordance data. This study implies the need for careful guidance, collaborative group works, and strategy teaching in data-driven learning tasks.