Research And Development Of A Self-access DDL System Based On PGEE Corpus

With the growing attention on vocabulary teaching and learning and the implementation of the college English teaching and learning reform, vocabulary was increasingly found a bottom neck for college undergraduates and graduates. To meet the requirements of the reform, developing a special-purpose corpus has become an important theme. Even more important a theme is to build up a self-access data-driven learning (DDL) system based on the corpus. This thesis combines the approach of DDL and self-access language learning (SALL) and aims at developing a self-access DDL system based on the post-graduate entrance exam (PGEE) to facilitate vocabulary learning and raise learner autonomy.So far, the author has mainly done two jobs. Firstly, the author has built a corpus based on PGEE exam texts of 17 years from 1992 to 2008. Secondly, the author has designed and helped developed a self-access DDL system based on the corpus. The self-access material is one piece of software which could be used in many different ways to do exercises and to learn vocabulary. The creativity lies in the instant screen concordance capturing function. It is similar to the Kingsoft instant screen word meaning capturing function. That is to say, when you move the cursor to a given target word, the concordance of a search term corresponding to the target word would appear within less than half a second next to the target word. The concordance includes the information of the source of the hits (file name) and some selective comments about part of speech and word meanings. To insure the reliability and validity of the research, the author also did a pretest with questionnaire on four campuses of Sichuan University and University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC). Altogether the author has collected around 190 pieces, of which there are 170 valid ones. The results show that around 42% of the subjects think vocabulary is the most difficult part in their review of PGEE. And more than half of the students inquired think that the system would benefit a lot the understanding of the key word. In terms of vocabulary memory, around 86% students consider that it makes a positive sense to vocabulary memorizing.