Application Of Corpus-based Lexical Approach To Vocabulary Teaching

It is generally known that the three basic elements of language are the vocabulary, grammar and phonetic. Wilkins asserts, "without grammar very little can be conveyed, without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed". So, the vocabulary is basis of learning English well and it is also the key to cultivate the language skills of students, such as listening, speaking, reading, writing and translating, etc. The vocabulary teaching plays a very important role in English teaching. All this time, it draws the attention of teachers and students.In recent years, a lot of researches have been done on vocabulary teaching and also found many teaching methods, such as translation method; visual method; definition method; etc. However, from status quo of the current senior middle school vocabulary teaching, it is not difficult to find that both teachers and students put overemphasis on increasing the number of vocabulary, but neglect to improve the vocabulary quality. Besides, the present vocabulary teaching method is to give an English word, then to mark its Chinese meaning and usage, which can not effectively stimulate students’ enthusiasm and curiosity in learning English. Therefore, the effect of the old method can only enlarge students’ vocabulary and strengthen the vocabulary memory, which can not meet the requirements of the New Curriculum Standard. In order to solve this problem, this thesis mainly discusses a teaching method based on corpus, the application of Corpus-based Lexical Approach. In addition, the development of corpus is very quickly. The corpus has rich corpora resources and advanced retrieval software, which opened up a new direction for language research and language teaching. Additionally, this thesis mainly uses the new family member of the Brown Corpus, Crown-CLOB corpus to assist instruction.Nowadays, more and more corpora are applied in college teaching, but the less in the middle school teaching practice. Therefore, this thesis tries to combine corpus and English lexical teaching design, and through the experimental way to explore feasibility and effectiveness of the method. According to Lewis Michael’s definition of lexical approach, the main purpose of the lexical teaching is to improve the autonomous learning ability of students. Students can use the corpus approach to analyze lexical collocation and to distinguish synonyms or by analyzing the context syntax to distinguish the part of speech and meaning of the polysemant in this context. In the process of vocabulary teaching, first, teachers must according to their own teaching experience and the learning situation of students select the target vocabulary from senior middle school’s English textbook., then, used AntConc software to retrieve the target vocabulary and delete the more difficult concordance-lines, finally, showed students rest of the concordance-lines and asked students to analyze. In the process of analysis, first, students must to thinking by themselves, then, need to carry group discussion and get assumptions, finally, they can conclude that the correct usage of words.In order to examine the effects of this teaching method, this research selected two parallel classes in Huaibin Senior Middle School as the research object. This thesis tries to apply Corpus-based Lexical Approach into daily teaching practice. The author took the methods of interview and exam to verify. After a period of teaching practice, students in experimental class keep a favor attitude toward this teaching mode, and their vocabulary also have got the relating improvement, besides, the result they have been received is much better. According to SPSS22.0 data analysis results, we can find, this teaching method is effective. It can help students to grasp the breadth and depth of vocabulary, learn to improve the comprehensive language ability and make up for the disadvantage of traditional vocabulary teaching method. In this thesis, author designed questionnaire to know the students’attitude toward Corpus-based Lexical Approach, and from the questionnaire, it is not difficult to conclude that if students have a strong autonomous learning ability, they will gain a lot of benefits from this teaching method; On the contrary, it is more suitable for the traditional vocabulary teaching method. So, the author suggests that teachers should combine Corpus-based Lexical Approach and traditional teaching methods, so as to achieve better effect of English vocabulary teaching.