An Empirical Study Of The Use Of COCA To Promote Junior School Students’ Lexical Competence In English Writing

Many previous studies show that lexical competence is one of the most important factors for writing a good composition,while one’s productive vocabulary best makes up his or her writing ability.However,the traditional text-book based EFL writing teaching in the middle school produces little language output,which causes the students unable to use natural and fresh words and phrases in their writing,let alone advanced English vocabulary.Therefore,in recent years,an increasing number of researchers have turned their attention to the application of computer corpus technology in English writing teaching,so as to provide students with more language input in the real language context.It is found from the existing literature that studies of combining writing teaching and data-driven learning are rare,even fewer in junior students’ lexical competence.Under such circumstances,the author took advantage of the teaching internship to carry out a ten-week experiment.Altogether 70 students from Grade 9 in a middle school participated in the experiment with 35 as the experimental group and the other 35 as the controlled group.The experimental group was trained to use COCA as in a semester-long data-driven learning and the experiment was conducted through the following four stages: difficulty test for COCA,classroom training,pilot study and formal experiment.Through the comparisons of experimental and control groups,as well as analysis of questionnaires and interviews,the research is to explore the feasibility of the use of COCA to improve junior school students’ lexical competence in writing.The research questions are as follows:(1)Is there a significant growth in the writing proficiency of students’ compositions between the experimental group and the controlled group? If so,to what extent?(2)Is there a significant growth in lexical competence on the part of the students in experimental group after they have used COCA to assist their compositions? If so,to what extent?(3)What were the perceptions of students’ attitudes towards using COCA as a writing aid in the experimental group after the experiment? Are there any changes?The research data of this study include the questionnaires,interviews,two writing tests before and after the experiment and the writing samples.The questionnaire was designed from three dimensions including students attitudes toward online learning,COCA-assisted writing and autonomous learning ability.Reliability and validity of the questionnaires were analyzed before the experimental study.CLAWS7 and AntConc were used to calculate lexical diversity and density;SPSS22.0 was used to analyze the quantitative data.Research findings are:(1)With the assistance of COCA,there was a significant growth in the English writing proficiency of the experimental group before and after the experiment(t=3.875,p=0.000<0.05),while there was no significant growth in the writing proficiency of the controlled group(t=3.41,p=0.735>0.05).(2)The use of COCA significantly improved the lexical diversity(t = 2.706,p=0.003<0.05)and lexical density(t=-9.014,p=0.000<0.05)of the experimental group significantly.In other words,the growth in their lexical diversity and lexical density reflects the significant improvement in their lexical competence.(3)Students had more positive attitudes toward using COCA in their writing procedures improved after 10-week experiment.The students in experimental group hold the views that it can cultivate their autonomous learning ability,and they will turn to corpus for help when they encounter language problems in the future.The preliminary findings of this study have the following implications for foreign language teaching :(1)Teachers should instruct students to make full use of network corpus resources to acquire vocabulary input.(2)Instead of textbook-centered writing teaching,teachers should combine writing teaching with a computer technology to enhance students’ interest in writing.(3)Teachers should pay attention to the cultivation of students’ lexical competence,and take the lexical richness as one of the important criteria for evaluating compositions.(4)Teachers should integrate vocabulary teaching into writing teaching,in which COCA can be used to help students build a semantic network so that they can quickly extract words according to the topics.At the same time,shortcomings of this research should be pointed out.In future studies,the number of students involved should be increased,and the researching time should be extended to obtain more reliable research results.It is expected that this study may throw some light on the issue of writing teaching.