USING NEW WEB-BASED CORPUS TOOLS IN L2 WRITING: PRE-SERVICE TEACHERS’ PERCEPTIONS AND EXPERIENCES WITH NETSPEAK.

It has been decades since corpora and corpus interfaces have emerged and become accessible to various users. As computers have been advancing in terms of speed and quality, so have corpus software providing faster and more advanced language investigations for language teachers and learners. In addition, corpus interface developers have constantly aimed to make language investigation easier and the queries more user-friendly to the user. In the recent times, some new web-corpus tools have emerged that specifically have teachers and students in mind. These include, for instance, SKELL, Netspeak, Just-the-word, among others. While there has been extensive research in the use of standard corpora and corpus interfaces, there has been little research in the use of these new web-based corpus tools in classroom settings. This paper reports on a small-scale study on the use of Netspeak in L2 writing and error correction conducted with a group of pre-service English language teachers. The results indicate that the participants have positive perceptions of the online corpus tool when used as a reference tool to improve writing. The paper also reports on some limitations identified throughout the study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]