| David Arthur Wilkins(1972) proposed that “without grammar, very little can be conveyed; without vocabulary, nothing can be conveyed.” No language learners can neglect or ignore the importance of vocabulary acquisition. Many scholars, teachers and students have already made much effort in enlarging and deepening the vocabulary, while the results are not as satisfactory as expected. It is essential for students to have a good command of vocabulary to develop students overall language skills. Just like using blocks to build houses, vocabulary can be seen as the cornerstone of language competence. Over the centuries, scholars and teachers have devoted much time in exploring effective methods and approaches of vocabulary teaching. However, most of these methods and measures target at enlarging vocabulary pool and long term memory. While the studies on how to enhance students abilities of using correct and suitable vocabulary has not made much. Most students have not fully developed their capability of choosing and using the correct vocabulary according to the context and situations, which can’t meet the needs of cultivating learners’ competence for utilizing the language in real circumstances.With the booming of computer technology and science, corpora has developed rapidly out of people’s imagination and stepped into a new era. Data-Driven Learning is a new corpus-based method which is first put forward by Tim Johns in 1990 s.Because of its convenience and rich resources, it has changed the learning strategy, the learning methods and learning materials. In principle, it strives to guide students to observe, discover, induce analyze and generalize the patterns of vocabulary usages, meanings and pragmatic features.After a careful and deep study of the previous research papers, we can find that the corpora based DDL method has got much attention from the university level, but it is hardly used in the Junior High School.This paper, integrated the DDL methods with autonomous learning theory, self discovery, constructivism and schema theory, tries to enhance students enthusiasm and interests towards language leraning, form and optimize their learning strategies, develop their autonomy learning motivation and try to improve learners abilities of mastering vocabulary. Via DDL method, students can get more chances and vehicles to use words correctly and accurately and can meet the ultimate goal that is to enlarge the vocabulary and develop language competence.This thesis focus on English vocabulary teaching in corpus-based DDL context in Junior high school. The study covers five parts. The first part aims to provide a brief introduction of the study covering the study background, the significance. The second part, which intends to offer the literature review and related theory so that we can have a better understanding of the previous study both from home and abroad. The third part is about the experiment and case study. To implement the experiment as desired, the author adopted two parallel classes from Junior two. We have a pre-test, curriculum tests and delayed test independently. After the experiment, we also issued questionnaires for the participants from the experiment class and interviewed teachers from the same grade. Based on the statistics and analysis, we can draw the conclusion that this approach is helpful to students English vocabulary learning especially on the aspect of developing students autonomous learning, enhancing the ability to recall the vocabulary, with a further development and have deeper understanding of the the vocabulary knowledge. Some obstacles and difficulties occur to us when we execute the experiment. Some shortcomings and disadvantages can also be noted.Finally, the author suggests that corpus-based DDL method can be considered as an insightful method to enrich our vocabulary teaching to achieve better effects along with the traditional method in Junior high schools. |
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