A Stduy On The Effect Of Application Of Corpus-based DDL Approach To College English Writing Teaching

The past few years have witnessed the rapid development of college English teachingreform, which pays special attention to the listening and speaking ability of students. However,taking a quick look at the students’ performance in all kinds of English writing test, we caneasily find how poor they are. For a long time, writing teaching in college English class hasbeen a big headache for most teachers and students. Confined to the prescribed class hour andtraditional teaching method–product approach and process approach which stronglyinfluence the writing teaching in college English class, students without any guidance but tofollow the writing models neglect the importance of word collocation and context. Moreover,what they are doing is just copying and reciting with no initiative to automatically probe intothe language.In order to solve this problem and quest for a new approach which adapts the teachingand learning of college English writing, this paper introduces a corpus-based DDL approachto the teaching and learning of college English writing. And how this new approach workswith the writing teaching is discussed through an experiment.As an emerging discipline, corpus linguistics has witnessed rapid development in recentyears. Corpus with authentic language data and advanced concordance software makes itpossible to analyze masses of language data in an efficient way. And driven by questions to beresolved students are encouraged to analyze and summarize the use of language from realcorpus. They may take initiative to think and question actively.Based on the analysis of the trend of college English writing teaching this thesis conductsan teaching experiment by using corpus-based DDL approach to see if this could help studentswith their writing problems and in what aspects can this approach work better.Based on the analysis of the current trend in the teaching of the college English writing aswell as the present problems, in this paper, a writing course has been given to students guidedby corpus-based DDL approach. After a WWB-based analysis and comparison between apre-test and post-test, it can come to the conclusion that this new teaching approach caneffectively improve students’ ability and performance in writing. However, although resultsalso indicate that it is apparent to see their progress in choosing the vocabulary shifting from basic level to advanced level as well as the use of correct collocation, improvement atcontextual level can rarely be found.