An Empirical Study On Corpus-based Vocabulary Learning

As an integral part of language learning, vocabulary has always been the focus of both teachers and learners. A number of studies have been conducted to explore more effective methods of vocabulary leaning. However, most of these methods aim only at large vocabulary size and long memorization. Even though the students memorize a great number of words, they do not seem to develop the corresponding competence of lexical use. They still have problems when they actually try to use the words.With the development of computer technology, the last several decades have witnessed the rapid growth of corpora. Taking the advantage of the abundant linguistic materials from corpora and advanced concordancing softwares, the corpus linguistics has opened up new field for linguistic research and language pedagogy. Under such conditions, a corpus-based learning method, Data-Driven-Learning (DDL) was proposed. DDL, characterized by authentic input, discovery learning and autonomy learning, has drawn much attention.This study attempts to integrate corpus into vocabulary learning, investigating its effects and shortcomings. The subjects of this study are a class of 66 non-English-major freshmen from HuaZhong University of Science and Technology. Two different learning methods, DDL and traditional method, were adopted, by the same group of students, to learn two different group of words, which are chosen by pre-test. The immediate test and one-week delayed test were adopted to test the effect of different learning method on vocabulary learning and retention, respectively. In addition, a questionnaire was used to investigate the participants'response.The results of the tests show that the participants perform better with the words learned in DDL, both in the immediate test and the delayed test. Therefore, it can be indicated that, in comparison with traditional learning method, DDL has positive effect on vocabulary learning. The immediate test results revealed that, with DDL, students could not only remember more words, but also learn them in a deep way. They have learnt the comprehensive knowledge of the words. That is where the greatest potential of DDL lies. Although it is not optimistic enough, the superiority of DDL can also be witnessed from the results of the delayed test, from which it is clear that the DDL could keep better retention. It is also useful for the practical use of words. The great potentials of DDL can also be derived from the results of the questionnaire. The consensus was achieved that DDL, not only could improve the vocabulary learning deeply, but also turns out to be a good example of autonomous learning, which enhance their learning ability. However, some shortcomings are also revealed. For example, the DDL method is quite time-consuming. Finally, the author suggests that, DDL should be used in vocabulary learning, through various ways.