Promoting Learner Autonomy Via Corpus-based English Vocabulary Learning In Senior High School

Since the concept of learner autonomy was brought into the area of foreignlanguage teaching, more and more scholars have studied the learner autonomy.Foreign language education has gradually shifted its center from teacher to student.And also, the English Curriculum Standard has explicitly pointed out that to developthe students’ learner autonomy ability is one of the aims of English education.Corpus is characterized by its large capacity, authentic material and accurateretrieval. And also, corpus provides language learners with a mode of learnerautonomy. Thus, more and more scholars begin to focus their attention on how topromote learner autonomy through corpus.Vocabulary plays a significant role in English learning. However, the vocabularylearning is one of the weak points for senior high students in Chinese context. Thus,how to improve the vocabulary learning ability of senior high school studentsbecomes more important.Based on the status quo and those concepts above, the author carried out aresearch to develop learner autonomy via corpus-based English vocabulary learning insenior high school. Firstly, the author introduces the origin of the study, rationale ofthe study and the structure of the thesis in the part of introduction. Then, the authorexplains and analyzes the concepts of corpus and learner autonomy and previousrelated researches. In chapter three, the author presents learner autonomy mode basedon corpus, which contains index, corpus query, the application of corpus inautonomous vocabulary learning and the role of teachers in corpus-based learnerautonomy. The author puts the focus on the application of corpus in autonomousvocabulary learning, which includes words frequency statistics, synonymsdiscrimination, vocabulary collocation and the use of corpus index in autonomylearning. The fourth chapter is the research design. This chapter focuses on theintroductions of research tools and the experimental procedures. The former includesquestionnaire, pre-test and post-test and the interview. The author divides theexperimental procedure into three stages: before experiment, in experiment and afterexperiment.Before the experiment, in order to know the vocabulary problems of senior highschool students and to detect whether there is a significant difference between thelevel of vocabulary learning in the two classes, the author carried out the questionnaire, which is about the vocabulary learning situation of senior high schoolstudents, and the pre-test in the experimental class and control class. During theexperiment, the author employed corpus-based vocabulary teaching mode and thetraditional vocabulary teaching mode in the experimental class and control classrespectively. In the experimental class, the author gradually guided the students toproceed with autonomous vocabulary learning through concrete teaching practice andto cultivate students’ autonomous learning awareness. After the experiment, the authorconducted the post-test in the two classes at the same time. In order to further confirmwhether the students’ awareness of autonomous learning has improved or not, theauthor interviewed14students of the experimental class and recorded the primitivedata.The fifth chapter is the data collection and analysis. In this chapter, the authoranalyzes the questionnaire, the pre-test and post-test and the interview data one by one.The result of the questionnaire reveals that the students’ awareness of autonomousvocabulary learning is weak. The result of the pre-test shows that there are nosignificant differences between vocabulary learning ability of the students of the twoclasses. However，the result of the post-test shows that the average score ofexperimental class is higher than that of control class and there is a significantdifference between the average score of the post-test. In addition, the primitive data ofthe interview reveals that most of the students in experimental class hold a positiveattitude toward the corpus-based vocabulary learning mode and also their awarenessof autonomous learning enhanced a lot.So, the results of this experiment indicate that corpus-based vocabulary teachingmethod is beneficial to the vocabulary learning of the high school students, theimprovement of high school students’ interest in vocabulary learning, the overallunderstanding of the vocabulary and the development of the high school students’autonomous learning consciousness and ability. The author hopes that the research,which apply corpus to senior high school students autonomous learning ofvocabulary, can arouse more scholars to study this learning strategy.