The Research Of Corpus In Vocabulary Teaching And Learning In Senior Middle School

It is all well known that vocabulary has a so important role in language teaching andlearning that one’s acquisition of quantity and quality of vocabulary determines he’sacquisition of this language.However, observing most of the middle schools in our province, we can find thisphenomenon that so many teachers and students pay their attention to the breadth ofvocabulary, while little to the depth. Besides, most teachers illustrate vocabulary in traditionalway that teachers give an English word, then explain its meaning in Chinese and finally showsome examples. This method harms student’s enthusiasm of learning vocabulary and violatesthe New Curriculum Requirements. To this problem, the author pays attention to the newteaching method which is Corpus and Data Driven Leaning and the influence to thevocabulary teaching and learning.Corpus collocates a large current authentic materials, thus it can avoid the state examplesboth in textbook and from the teachers. Besides that, corpus can provide concordance lineswhich can reveal the vocabulary, collocation and its grammar structure.In the term "Data-Driven-Learning"(DDL) which was defined by Tim Johns in1991thenature of learning through corpus is well summed up. The main idea of this method islearning by the students themselves. Making use of the language data, students can come upquestions, solve them and generalize the vocabulary knowledge, like the collocation of thevocabulary, the semantic prosody of the vocabulary and the grammar rules of the vocabularyby themselves.The paper is based on the experiment to check the usage of corpus and DDL in middleschool vocabulary teaching and learning. The subjects of this study are two parallel classes ofGrade one in Taiyuan Jian Caoping area No.1senior middle school. Class one is randomlyselected as experimental class and class two the control one. DDL is used in class one while the traditional method in class two. Pretest is administered before the experiment and post-testafter it. The data of the two tests are to selected and analyzed with the statistical software17.0.The results of the data analysis reveal that the post-test score of experimental class ismuch higher than the one in control class. What’s more, there is a significant differencebetween the pretest and post-test in experimental class, and the difference is more significantthan it in the control class. Therefore, this experiment can show that DDL is useful approachof teaching vocabulary. Compared with the traditional method, DDL can help students toincrease their vocabulary knowledge, especially the quality aspect. DDL is a supplementarymeans of teaching vocabulary.Finally, it should be pointed out that even though corpus is useful to vocabulary teachingand learning, it has the shortcoming of time consuming and so on. Therefore, no matter howvaluable the corpus is, it is just a tool and cannot replace the textbooks and classroomteaching. It is only a supplementary tool. It should be used with the traditional method.