The gap between intentions and reality: Reasons for EAP writers’ non-use of corpora

Over the last three decades, extensive research has been devoted to EAP students’ use of corpora for academic writing. However, corpus use has usually been ascertained immediately post-course; data on long-term use is sparse and little attention has been paid to those who give up using corpora. This study investigates the extent of corpus non-use and students’ reasons for discontinuing the practice in the long term. It draws on data from two questionnaires: (1) immediate post-course (ImmPQ); (2) delayed post-course (DelPQ) completed a year later. Participants were 182 graduates who took a six-week course during which they built and consulted do-it-yourself corpora in their own field. Results from ImmPQ showed that most students (63%) used their corpus regularly (≥ 1/week), but one year later DelPQ revealed that regular use had decreased to 36%. Although 87% of respondents to ImmPQ stated their intention to use their corpus in the future, DelPQ reported a total of 37% of non-users. There were 86 mentions of reasons for non-use; the most prevalent were: not doing any academic writing (29%), the use of other tools (20%), time issues and corpus issues (10% each). It is argued that students’ scarcity of time is a possible underlying cause of much non-use and the study suggests some ways in which long-term corpus take-up could be increased.