IMPLEMENTATION OF DIRECT CORPUS APPLICATIONS TO L2 COLLABORATIVE WRITING PEDAGOGY: THE IMPACT ON LEARNER INTERACTION, WRITTEN OUTPUT AND DEVELOPMENT

Author

• Ahmet Egemen Curuk

Date

2026

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Department

English

Committee Chair

Rebecca Adams

Committee Chair

Elliott Casal

Committee Member

Emily Thrush

Abstract

This dissertation examines the implementation of direct corpus applications within L2 collaborative writing pedagogy and investigates their impact on learner interaction, as well as measurable gains in syntactic complexity, lexical complexity, and accuracy during collaborative writing and in subsequent individual writing. Although prior research has established the pedagogical value of corpus-based instruction and collaborative writing separately, little is known about how these approaches function when integrated, particularly with an emphasis on the learner experience and the interactional mechanisms that mediate learning. To address this gap, this dissertation adopts a mixed-methods design to explore how corpus-guided collaborative writing shapes dyadic interaction, language-related episodes (LREs), and both collaborative and individual writing development over time. The study was conducted with 40 Turkish undergraduate EFL learners in an online classroom context and employed a quasi-experimental design that combined explicit corpus training, corpus-guided collaborative writing tasks, and comparison conditions without corpus guidance. Quantitative analyses examined changes in learners’ written output using measures of syntactic complexity, lexical complexity and accuracy across multiple sessions and testing points. Qualitative analyses were conducted on the voice and screen interaction records, followed by semi-structured recall interviews to trace and explore the intentionality of the interactional process of the learners. This was done by focusing on how dyads engaged with corpus tools, negotiated form and meaning, and resolved LREs during writing. Quantitative findings indicate that corpus-guided collaborative writing supports measurable development in select linguistic domains, with particular gains observed in syntactic complexity, lexical sophistication and accuracy-related measures. Qualitative findings further demonstrate that the pedagogical value of corpus use depend on how learners engage with them collaboratively as one of the most important outcomes of this study is that the only dyad that sustained balanced, critical engagement with corpus evidence produced a significant development trend in syntactic complexity. By integrating direct corpus applications into collaborative writing pedagogy, this dissertation highlights the mechanisms through which corpus use mediates learning and highlights the roles of peer deliberation and guided attention to form. The findings offer theoretical contributions to research on data-driven learning and collaborative writing, as well as pedagogical implications for designing corpus-informed writing tasks.

Comments

Data is provided by the student.”

Library Comment

Dissertation or thesis originally submitted to ProQuest/Clarivate.

Notes

Open Access

Recommended Citation

Curuk, Ahmet Egemen, "IMPLEMENTATION OF DIRECT CORPUS APPLICATIONS TO L2 COLLABORATIVE WRITING PEDAGOGY: THE IMPACT ON LEARNER INTERACTION, WRITTEN OUTPUT AND DEVELOPMENT" (2026). Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive. 3946.
https://digitalcommons.memphis.edu/etd/3946