An Empirical Study Of Corpus-based Vocabulary Teaching In Junior Middle School

The application of corpus in foreign language teaching covers many fields,among which corpus-based vocabulary teaching is the earliest and has achieved fruitful results.In general,most researchers focus on corpus-based vocabulary teaching in senior high school and college,but studies on the application of corpus in junior middle school are quite rare.Therefore,based on data-driven learning theory and other related theories,this study is intended to investigate the effects of corpus-based vocabulary teaching on junior middle school students’ English vocabulary by providing students with the concordances of target vocabulary from Corpus of Contemporary American English(COCA).94 ninth grade students of a junior middle school(48 students in the experimental class and46 students in the control class)participated in the present study.In the eight weeks’ teaching experiment,the experimental class adopted corpus-based vocabulary teaching while the control class still followed traditional vocabulary teaching.Vocabulary tests and a questionnaire were adopted as research instruments.The specific attention is paid to the effects of corpus-based vocabulary teaching on students’ vocabulary retention,and the effects of corpus-based vocabulary teaching on students’ acquisition of the depth of vocabulary knowledge in terms of collocation,colligation and context meaning.In addition,students’ attitudes towards corpus-based vocabulary teaching are also investigated.Research results are shown as following: first,corpus-based vocabulary teaching can help students memorize vocabulary;second,corpus-based vocabulary teaching can promote students’ depth of vocabulary knowledge in terms of collocation,colligation and context meaning;third,most students in the experimental class show positive attitudes towards corpus-based vocabulary teaching.Pedagogical implications are discussed for vocabulary teaching in junior middle school.Firstly,teachers should process target vocabulary according to students’ existing level in teaching planning.Secondly,teachers should be familiar with corpus and its retrieval functions to integrate corpus data into classroom teaching materials and make full use of corpus to supplement textbook materials so that students can learn vocabulary in the various context.