In most Asian countries, students receive between six and eight years of compulsory English education before they enter university. Despite this massive investment in English education, many students, especially in Japan, continue to show a poor understanding of rudimentary grammar rules.
In this paper we report on a unique English course designed specifically to address grammar issues at low (remedial) levels using a Data-Driven Learning (DDL) approach. Applications of DDL are becoming more widely reported, but they are generally at the intermediate or advanced level. One of the challenges of using DDL at the remedial level is the lack of suitably leveled corpora. Another
challenge is that most corpus tools used in DDL are designed for researchers or advanced learners and thus can appear overly complex. To address these issues, we have developed a simple English corpus built from standard school texts. We have also created a freeware, parallel corpus tool, AntPConc, that is specially designed to be simple, easy, and intuitive to use by beginner learners. Results from the course show significant gains between pre- and post-tests of grammar understanding for beginner-level EFL university students. We also obtained positive student feedback on the AntPConc software.