Research On Corpus-based ESP Teaching

English,as a tool of international communication,is becoming an international lingua franca.With the deepening of economic globalization,its importance is becoming more and more prominent.Countries all over the world regard English language competence as an important part of the cultural quality of citizens,and view the foreign language level of their citizens as one of the important indicators to measure the national cultural level.The demand for international and compound talents with professional knowledge in a certain field as well as English communication ability is increasing.It has become a trend for College English to change from general English to English for Specific Purposes.ESP teaching has been carried out for about 40 years in China,but the results are far more than satisfactory.A series of problems still exist,such as time-consuming and inefficient teaching,the phenomena of “dumb English”and single and dull teaching mode,etc.With the popularization of big data and artificial intelligence technology,the educational environment has undergone profound changes,which provides a new context for ESP teaching and offers new technical possibilities for getting rid of the predicament of ESP teaching.Corpus is a large-scale electronic text base which is sampled and processed in a scientific way.Corpus research is one of the most rapidly developed fields in Applied Linguistics in recent years.It has accumulated fruitful research findings in translation,discourse analysis and other fields.However,the research on the application of corpus technology into teaching practice is very few,especially in ESP teaching,which is still at the initial stage.The area is far more than being thoroughly researched and empirical research is scarce.This study starts with literature research,focusing on the current situation and development trend of ESP teaching,which lays a theoretical foundation for this study.Meanwhile,the ESP teaching status of S University is investigated.Through questionnaire survey,semi-structured interview and classroom observation,combing with consulting a large number of teaching materials such as Program Talent Training Scheme,Curriculum Quality Standard,Textbook Subscription Record,Final Examination Paper and Course Quality Analysis Report,a large amount of first-hand data is obtained.The conditions of ESP teachers,teaching materials,curriculum settings,classroom teaching mode,students’ self-study and course evaluation are investigated to find out the existing problems,which serve as the logical starting point of the study.The research is problem-oriented.Based on the self-built small-scale special corpus,teaching material corpus and online virtual corpus,the corpus-based ESP teaching mode is built,which aims at assisting ESP teaching with corpus data mining technology.It provides a new technical solution to the existing problems such as unclear teaching objectives,obsolete teaching materials,teachers’ low ability of teaching materials development and insufficient learning motivation of students.The key of this teaching mode is to create conditions for the real implementation of the teaching concept of "student centered" with the data mining technology of corpus.The research offers concrete practical cases,from the stage of course design,online MOOCS teaching,personalized teaching material development,offline classroom teaching activity design,multimodal personalized homework release to multi-dimensional teaching evaluation,and so on.It analyzes the corpus functions and technology advantages and the linguistic theoretical basis behind each stage,and then connects them with the specific teaching objectives of each stage.Through 16 weeks of experimental research,the results of the experiment show that the teaching mode has a significant effect on the students’ core technical vocabulary acquisition,especially the productive technical vocabulary knowledge and the comprehensive English skills.At the same time,it has positive effects on the cultivating of students’ high-level thinking abilities such as learning motivation,extracurricular autonomous learning ability,critical thinking and so on.This study proposes a corpus-based ESP teaching mode,which aim at changing the current situation of scattered and non-systematic related research condition,which is not very instructive to ESP teaching.It integrates the function and technical advantages of corpus with ESP teaching effectively,and provides a kind of procedural framework for later reference,which is a kind of theoretical innovation;Meanwhile,through self-built corpus,by use of the corpus functions such as Word Frequency,Key Words,Vocabulary Distribution,Seed Words,the core technical vocabulary list is drawn and personalized teaching materials are developed to meet the personalized learning needs of students,which is a kind of innovation in methodology;And finally,the research provides new ideas and solutions to solve some bottleneck problems that have been existed in ESP teaching for many years from a new perspective,which is an innovation of research perspective.