A Study On Corpus-based English Vocabulary Teaching In Senior High School

Vocabulary teaching is an important part in foreign language teaching. A large vocabulary isessential in developing students’ language skills, such as listening, speaking, reading and writing. As anintegral part of language learning, vocabulary has always been the focus of both teachers and learners. Anumber of studies have been conducted to explore more effective methods of vocabulary learning.However, most of these methods aim only at a large vocabulary size and long memorization. Students’capability of how to use word correctly has not been greatly improved. They still have problems when theyactually try to use the words, which turns out to be contradictory to the purpose of cultivating learners’practical competence for using language in real situations.With the development of computer technology, the recent decades have witnessed the rapid growth ofcorpora. Corpus with its rich resources and advanced concordancing software opens up a new field for thestudy of languages and language teaching. Under this condition, the DDL (Data-Driven-Leaching) method,based on corpus was born. This new learning method characterized by authentic language input,discovery learning and autonomous learning, draws the attention of people.According to the review of the researches, the corpus-based DDL method is more developed in theuniversity level, but seldom used in the senior high schools. This paper, starting from the teaching practiceand related educational theories, tends to investigate the corpus-based DDL method in English vocabularyteaching in senior high school, and to increase the students’ learning interest in English vocabularylearning, stimulate their learning motivation, and improve the students’ ability to master Englishvocabulary. The corpus-based DDL method, which is to create conditions and opportunities for seniorhigh school students accurately and effectively to use English words, is also used for them to enlarge theirvocabulary eventually.Based on the above analysis, this paper focuses on English vocabulary teaching and learning withcorpus-based DDL method in senior high school. The study attempts to integrate corpus-based DDLmethod into vocabulary learning, investigating its effects and shortcomings. The subjects of this study aretwo parallel classes of Grade Two in senior high school, and different learning methods, DDL andtraditional method, are adopted, by the two parallel classes, to learn the same group of words, which arechosen by the pre-test. The immediate test and one week later the delayed test are adopted to test theeffect of different learning methods on vocabulary learning and retention, respectively. In addition, aquestionnaire is used to investigate the participants’ responses. The experimental results show that the corpus-based DDL method is helpful to the senior high school learners’ vocabulary learning, especially onthe aspects of deepening the learners’ vocabulary knowledge and their long retention of the vocabulary.At the same time, the corpus-based DDL method turns out to be a good example of autonomous learning,which enhances the learners’ learning ability. However, some shortcomings are also revealed. Forexample, the DDL method is quite time-consuming, and so on. Finally, the author suggests that,corpus-based DDL method should be as a supplement to corporate with traditional methods in order toachieve better effect of vocabulary teaching and learning in senior high schools.