An Experimental Study Of Corpus-Based Data Driven Learning In Vocational College English Vocabulary Teaching

As a significant component of language teaching,the vocabulary teaching and learning has always been the focus of both teachers and students.However,it seems that most current vocabulary teaching methods emphasize the quantity of vocabulary,instead of the quality of vocabulary acquisition,which make it still difficult for student to use the newly-learned-vocabulary appropriately.As a result,students spend a large amount of time in memorizing words but their capability of employing words properly has not been improved much,which not only discourage students' enthusiasm,but also turns out to be contradictory to the objective of cultivating learners' practical competence for using language in authentic language environment.As corpus linguistics develops in recent decades,corpus data and the corpusbased method as well as Data Driven Learning(DDL)have explored a new field for the study of languages and language teaching.The DDL method,characterized by abundant,authentic language materials and autonomous learning,has the potential benefits in language learning.However,the DDL method has not been widely used in actual classroom instruction.Hence,the teaching effectiveness of DDL needs to be further approved.This paper is based on the inspiration of DDL method and practical demand,aiming to explore the results of the corpus-based DDL method in English vocabulary teaching in vocational colleges,to improve the students' ability to apply English vocabulary to practical use,and to make a much wider range of learners benefit from corpus.Based on the above objectives,this paper conducts experiment in vocational colleges revolving around corpus concordancing and corpus-based DDL method.The subjects of this study are two parallel classes in Chengdu Agricultural Science and Technology Vocational College,which are assigned to the control group and the experiment group respectively.Meanwhile,two different learning methods--traditional method and DDL--are introduced to the participants respectively to learn the same group of words.The pretest and posttest are adopted to check the results of different learning methods on vocabulary learning.Additionally,a questionnaire is used to investigate the student's responses.The experimental results show that the DDL method is useful to the vocational colleges freshmen's vocabulary learning,especially to the depth of vocabulary knowledge learning.However,some defects of this method are also revealed.For example,the DDL method is quite timeconsuming and overworked.Therefore,in conclusion,the author advises that corpus-based DDL method can be used in combination with the traditional methods,contributing to vocabulary learning effectively.