A Corpus-based Study Of EFL Learners' Vocabulary Knowledge

This thesis is based on an analysis of two corpora, a native-speakers' corpus, named TalkBank and CET-SET corpus, a collection of data by non-native Chinese students from a spoken English test. Three words, like, know and very were chosen to discern the differences between native and non-native speakers. The thesis also includes a report of the results of a questionnaire survey conducted among EFL learners (freshmen and sophomores) and teachers about their views on vocabulary learning. Freshmen and sophomores show similar response to most items and they differ in some opinions from those of EFL teachers. With the help of corpora and concordancing program, it is possible to find out the differences in the use of some frequent words between native and non-native speakers. Cases of overuse, underuse and inappropriate use in EFL learners' corpus are found. Implications for language teaching are thus drawn and suggestions are made for future research. Corpus should be made full use of in both language learning and teaching.