Pérez-Paredes, P. & Cantos Gómez, P. 2004. Some Lessons Students Learn: Self-discovery and Corpora. Corpora and Language Learners. Studies in Corpus Linguistics 17, p. 247-57 Some Lessons Students Learn: Self-discovery and Corpora Pascual Pérez-Paredes & Pascual Cantos-Gómez Universidad de Murcia (Spain) As a spin-off to the process of compilation of the Spanish component of the The Louvain International Database of Spoken Language Interlanguage (LINDSEI) corpus, advanced learners of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) at the University of Murcia have been given the chance to explore their own speaking output through a corpus-aided methodology. This paper presents a glimpse of the materials which have guided our students through the process of self-discovery of their own spoken discourse. Similarly, special attention is devoted to the learning principles underlying our form-focused approach whose target is students of English in their third and final year. Preliminary evidence in the form of face-to-face feedback about the reception of the protocol among the students who completed it suggests that form-focused attention facilitates noticing of often-unnoticed features of learner oral discourse. Introduction The type of work we propose here falls under the browsing category outlined by Aston (1997) and expanded by Bernardini (2000), where the corpus becomes a source of activity in itself and progressive discovery occurs on a negotiable step-by-step basis. This paper presents a glimpse of the materials which have guided our students through the process of self-discovery of their own spoken discourse, but attention is devoted to the learning principles underlying our form-focused approach. The materials as well as the rationale for the students’ work can be accessed on the Intranet of the UMU (University of Murcia) Language Laboratory, and further information on the course can be obtained from http://www.um.es/engphil/profesorado/pperez/reglada/curso2002-2003/lengua3. The target group of our proposal are students graduating in English, in their third year of studies at the University of Murcia, Spain. The activities described below are carried out in the modern languages laboratory during the regular lesson schedule. The teacher supervises and directs the students’ work, explaining the essentials of protocol completion and giving help and assistance on demand. Confronting learners with linguistic evidence, we aim at developing a critical attitude in our students towards the patterns of L2 use in their own discourse. The protocol is, for the most part, a collection of HTML files which exploit the Intranet and Internet resources available in the lab and which are aimed at facilitating the students’ explorations of their own pre-recorded oral output both as digitalised audio files and text files. Leaner autonomy, self-discovery and corpus-based work: The protocol for oral discourse appreciation This research aims at approaching an integration of the theoretical principles of Data Driven Learning to classroom-based awareness-raising activities with a focus on noticing acquisition through autonomous work on L2 production. The Protocol (see Appendix 1) is structured or divided into three main sections, where each of these sections corresponds to a different cognitive process/task. It intends to be a quantitative as well as a qualitative approach to oral performance of students, focusing on their vocabulary selection. Due to the brevity of instances of their oral production, and to the medium through which students access them (transcription), we have not considered other linguistic levels such as pronunciation or discourse features. Part I is devoted to a first preliminary qualitative analysis of the lexicon used by students in their oral output. To facilitate the task, we elaborated a concise, easy to complete spreadsheet, which can be easily implemented in Microsoft® Excel or any similar program. The spreadsheet contains detailed information