Application Of Corpus In Communicative Approach To College English Vocabulary Teaching

In any language, word is the basic component of sentence and it has the basic information of communication in the language. It is regarded as the essential element of a language. A good mastery of vocabulary has a direct effect on learners'five fundamental skills of listening, speaking, reading, writing and translation required in the language acquisition. As a result, vocabulary teaching is regarded as an important aspect of college English teaching. The present study is mainly concerned with how to improve the efficiency of college English vocabulary teaching.This thesis attempts to put forward a new vocabulary teaching method for college English vocabulary teaching and experiment with its efficiency. The attempted method is to make combinative application of the data from concordance of a corpus and communicative language teaching method. The Data Driven Learning Theory is applied in the method in which the data from the corpus is made available to the students to form knowledge framewok about the new words. Meanwhile it enlists the communicative language teaching method. It facilitates the students'vocabulary study by using corpus data and all kinds of communicative activities during the college English class. In order to validate the value and significance of the method, the author does the empirical research by putting this vocabulary teaching method into actual use in the college English class. Then, after teaching, two vocabulary tests are given to the subjects, and the scores collected from the experimental and control groups are compared. Through the analysis of the result collected in the vocabulary teaching experiment, the efficiency of the method on vocabulary learning is achieved and whether it has advantages over the traditional vocabulary teaching method is made clear.The study is based on the following two hypotheses: 1) When data of the new words from corpus is made available to the learners, it will facilitate learners'cognition of the new words to be studied and the learners will form their own vocabulary knowledge about them. 2) When given enough communicative practice of new words in different communicative contexts, English learners can get good proficiency and a long-term retention of them. In the experiment, the teaching material was 21st Century Practical College English and the corpus used is contemporary American English corpus which can be searched and used on the internet. The experimental instruments include two sets of questionnaires. The first one investigates the present vocabulary teaching situation in college. The second one investigates the teaching results achieved with the vocabulary teaching method explored by the author. The experimental instruments also include a pretest paper to select the target words and two sets of test papers composed according to the target words. The experiment is carried out on the non-English major sophomore of Jinan Vocational College. Firstly, the author chooses two groups of subjects who are of the similar English proficiency, one as the controlled group, and the other as the experimental group. Secondly, traditional vocabulary teaching method is applied in the controlled group, while the teaching method using corpus and CLT is applied in the experimental group. Then the first test is given to the students after the new words are taught immediately and two weeks later the other test is used to have a word test. Through the collection of the scores of the controlled and the experimental group, the author made the comparison to see if there are obvious differences between the two groups. Then, it is found that the scores achieved by the experimental group are much higher than those of the control group in the two tests.The thesis arrives at the conclusion that the vocabulary teaching method being explored in the thesis is more efficient than the traditional one in college vocabulary teaching. When data of the new words from corpus is made available to college English learners, it will facilitate learners'cognition of the new words. Enough communicative practice can make English learners get good proficiency and a long-term retention of the new words.