Teaching collocations through data-driven learning activities in a translation course for prospective elt teachers

Corpora are vast linguistic databases, which have become prominent with the advances in computer technology. They include millions of expressions in many different forms and contexts belonging to a particular language. The branch of the scientific field of linguistics that focuses on corporal studies and applications, i.e. Corpus Linguistics, has brought about a new wave of approaches in foreign language teaching. Today, corpus-based educational approaches have a key importance in enabling a learner to reach native level proficiency in a foreign language. Approaches that involve the teaching of corpus-based linguistic units, including collocations, through techniques such as "consciousness raising" and classroom concordancing have been found to be beneficial for use in EFL classrooms targeting different types of audiences. However, the scientific literature was found to be lacking of studies that focus on the particular use of corpus-based approaches in undergraduate level translation courses offered to ELT students. This may pose a problem, as translation courses carry a special significance in the language teaching curriculum. This study seeks to follow data-driven learning and teaching approaches to develop a program aimed for use in the translation course that seeks to increase the consciousness of undergraduate ELT students towards lexical collocations. The program is intended to increase the academic success of students in the translation class by enhancing their use of collocations and its effectiveness is therefore evaluated in this study by comparing student academic success using a pre-experimental pre-test post-test design.