Research On Application Of Corpus In Vocabulary Teaching And Learning In Middle School

It is acknowledged that vocabulary learning is a fundamental part in second language acquisition. While the situation in most of the middle schools in China is not optimistic, especially in the understanding and usage of synonyms and polysemy, such as the differences in collocation, colligational patterns and semantic preference, and the identification of the meaning of the polysemy in a specific context.While the vocabulary requirement in English Curriculum Criteria (2013edition) is increasing, and teachers could find that in the2013edition of English books for middle school students, the difficulty of vocabulary is advancing. Multiple choice and Cloze are designed to test the synonyms and polysemy. All of these problems urge the teachers to improve their teaching method in order to meet the new needs.Corpus collocates a large number of authentic materials, thus it can provide enough materials for teachers and students to analyze. Besides, the concordance lines provided by the corpus can reveal collocation and grammar structure of the target word. This paper mainly uses corpus like LOB and CLEC. LOB is used for analyzing and CLEC is used for correction of mistakes.This paper is designed to release the pressure of both the students and teachers. It introduces a new vocabulary teaching method which is based on corpus. In the term "Data-Driven-Learning"(DDL), Tim Johns stated that the main idea of DDL is for the students to learn by themselves. With the language data, the students learn to analyze the collocation and learn to identify the meaning of the polysemy. In the teaching process, firstly, the teacher should choose the target words according to their experience and the students’ performance. Secondly, the teacher accesses the target word in the software AntConc for the concordance lines. Thirdly, the teacher processes the concordance lines by deleting those which are too difficult for the students to understand. Fourthly, the teacher displays the processed concordance lines on the projector for the students to learn. Fifthly, the teachers give some hints for the students to guess and in this process, the students could discuss with their partners. Finally, after observing, analyzing and both independent thinking and discussion, the knowledge acquired by the students could last longer in their memory.To check the effect of this experimental teaching method after doing the experiment for a whole semester, the author designed three ways:interview, test and questionnaire. The SPSS analyzing results show that this teaching method is effective on a certain degree. It can help improve students’ performance in vocabulary, but it cannot minimize the difference between students. In order to obtain the reason for this phenomenon, the author designed a questionnaire, the results of which shows that only those students who are inclined in autonomous learning will benefit more in this new vocabulary teaching method. So in the vocabulary teaching, the teachers could combine the corpus-based vocabulary teaching method with the traditional method effectively.