A Study Of The Application Of English Corpus To The Improvement Of Students' English Writing In Senior High School

A corpus is a database which consists of large body of authentic linguistic materials in the form of electronic texts. To study linguistic features by applying corpus and data-driven-learning has become a major trend in the development of English curriculum. Currently, there are numerous studies of language output, for example, in the aspects of speaking and writing both at home and abroad. In the meanwhile, students'spoken and written ability has been improved greatly. However, to some extent, writing is still one of the weak aspects in EFL teaching and corpus has shown important implications for it since a corpus can be consulted as a referential tool or a study tool. The teaching method of data-driven-learning and corpus are more often used in the university, but seldom in the high school. However,with the development of technology, the computer and multimedia overhead projector has been popularized in senior high school in China. Students in senior high school can completely handle computers and multimedia, which offer them capability to use corpus and the method of data-driven-learning to accomplish some English learning tasks. So this study of the application of English corpus to the improvement of high school students'writing is of great theoretical significance and practical value.The purpose of this study is to identify the efficiency of the application of corpus to the improvement of students'writing in high school through an experiment, which included two tests, a questionnaire to students. The experiment involves 100 students (N=100) from two classes randomly selected from Grade 2 in JianChang No.3 Senior High School. The two classes were designated randomly as one experimental group and one control group. In this experiment, the control group was taught writing in the traditional teaching method through the whole term. In the mean time, corpus-based instruction was applied to the experimental group. There is the combination of qualitative and quantitative analyses in the study. Data was collected through questionnaire, pre-test and post-test. And then SPSS 16.0 software was employed to analyze the data of students' compositions. The results shows that the students from the experimental group made greater progress than the students from control group. The students from the experimental group used more authentic expressions in their compositions than the students from the control group. The questionnaire suggested that students favor this teaching approach.In the end, the author put forward suggestions and prospect for the application of English corpus to the improvement of students'English writing in senior high school.