Corpus-Based Autonomous Lexical Learning

In the past two decades, as the language teaching practice shifted to a more communicative approach, it has also become more learner-centered. Learners begin to play a central role in the management of their language study. Ever since its entrance into the field of language teaching, learner autonomy has been an ongoing concern of foreign language educators both at home and abroad.As an assistant tool in language education, corpus is a new study field in applied linguistics. Based on a large collection of authentic materials and advanced softwares, corpus makes an easy and quick analysis of the greatest amounts of linguistic data possible, and the learners are provided with a new approach to learn a language independently.The thesis focuses on the autonomous lexical learning in corpus-based contexts. On the basis of a case study, the aspects in which corpus can be applied in lexical learning were investigated and illustrated. At the end of the research, a questionnaire was designed and answered to test the effectiveness of the learning model. The corpus used in the research is New Horizon College English Corpus, a course corpus produced in 2004. It was initially designed as a teaching tool, so few research has been conducted based on this corpus. Finally, the thesis provides a summary of the findings and offers some pedagogical implications and suggestions for future research.