| British linguist D.A.Wilkins (1972) once said,“Without grammar, one cannot expressesmany things, without words, one cannot expresses anything”. Therefore, vocabulary is anindispensable part of language; vocabulary instruction is an important component in theEnglish education system as a whole. Traditional vocabulary teaching method is based ondefinition of the word and rote memorization; this traditional approach overlooks thecollocation of words and contextual learning. This traditional method of memory can onlyenable students to master the Chinese translations of English words, while in practice studentscan’t find English word that corresponds to Chinese translations. For beginners or low-levellearners, the traditional method will play instant results. But for high-level English learnersthe traditional method has been unable to help them to master the deeper meaning ofvocabulary and to use them correctly.With computer linguistics and corpus linguistics developing, corpus which isrepresentative of a big database provides vocabulary teaching with a reliable, objective realcorpus. Thereby it provides vocabulary teaching with science, visual teaching basis. Inaddition, as the study of semantics and pragmatics grows, in recent years linguisticresearchers apply these results to vocabulary instruction, and many scholars blend theirrespective advantages to utilizing comprehensively, thereby that develops vocabularyteaching methods. Sinclair’s lexical grammar theory builds relationships between words fromthe aspects of grammar, semantic and pragmatic. So, it is very important to explore theimpacts of corpus-based lexical grammar on vocabulary instruction. This thesis try to answer:(1) Does corpus-based lexical grammar theory help second-grade college students grasp themeanings and usages of words effectively?(2) Does corpus-based lexical grammar theoryhelp second-grade college students distinguish between synonyms?(3) Does corpus-basedlexical grammar theory help second-grade college students grasp words’ usage on the deepaspect like semantic and pragmatic level?To conduct the study, the pre-test, post-test and questionnaire are used as experimentaltools. This experiment involves60second-grade college students separated by two groups onaverage. One group is experimental group (EG) and the other control group (CG). Thisexperiment lasts one semester. Two groups were taught by the same content, and are carriedout by the same teacher, namely, the author. In the experiment the control group wasgenerally taught by traditional teaching method, but the corpus-based approach was applied tothe experimental group.The scores of two groups’ pre-test and post-test respectively were compared.The results show that corpus-based approach is effective to help improve students’competence of acquiring vocabulary. The experimental group students use vocabularyaccurately and solidly apply them into practice. The test scores of the experimental groupstudents are higher than that of the control group students. This indicates that corpus-basedapproach can improve students’ competence of acquiring vocabulary.The corpus-based approach to English vocabulary teaching can really enhance theefficiency of classroom teaching. Through this new teaching method students’ ability ofacquiring vocabulary has improved a lot. In the future this new teaching method will be paidmore and more attention. Moreover, as corpus and search software develops, more and moreresearch methods will constantly be applied to English vocabulary teaching. The study onEnglish vocabulary teaching based on corpus will also continue to develop and deepen. |
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