Abstract

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The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) has never been examined in an Iranian English as a Foreign language (EFL) classroom to develop students writing skills. However, it might allow learners to explore collocational competence by giving them access to the most frequent lexical bundles in written context. Mastery of idiomaticity of language is pivotal in the training of advanced level students who are preparing for IELTS writing tasks. To determine how far the COCA can contribute to increase this awareness, a series of task-based activities involving writing was drawn up and carried out in an EFL class. They were first introduced to this corpus analysis tool and encouraged to explore it further. Later on, in order to complete a writing task, they were prompted to resort to a series of strategies to collect information, to analyse and interpret data, and to draw conclusions about the most appropriate 2- 5 word lexical bundles of language interaction that can be used in their relevant setting. This paper provides (a) a brief literature review on this topic (b) a description of task-based activities, and implementation process, the students� strategies, the evaluation and self-reflection procedures, and (c) a critical reflection on this study that may open the path for further developments in this area and (d) an explanation of Implicit Instruction and the significant desire for future research. Finally, the questionnaire elicits students� opinions about the new tools� implementation, and the outcomes are discussed in detail.