A Study Of Corpus-based Vocabulary Teaching At Senior High Schools

Vocabulary,as the foundation of language,plays a vital role in the language acquisition of learners.The newest National English Curriculum Standard for General Senior High School(Ministry of Education,2018)has clear stipulations for vocabulary teaching.However,the effect of English vocabulary teaching and learning in China has not been satisfactory for many years.Therefore,how to promote learners' vocabulary acquisition through vocabulary teaching and learning has become a problem for teachers and learners.With the combination of linguistics and modern technology,corpus provides a novel perspective for vocabulary teaching with its authentic materials and unique concordance.Under such background and established in the conditions of vocabulary acquisition,the research reports an attempt based on Noticing Hypothesis,Output Hypothesis,Lexical Approach and Noticing Hypothesis to explore whether corpus-based vocabulary teaching method can promote high school students' English vocabulary acquisition and to discuss how to put the method into effect.The experiment selected 104 senior high school students from Nanjing S Senior High School as the research object,and adopted the traditional teacher-centered vocabulary teaching method and student-centered corpus-based vocabulary teaching method for the two classes respectively,aiming to answer the following questions: first,compared with traditional vocabulary teaching method,to what extent does corpus-based vocabulary teaching affect students' memorization of vocabulary? Second,compared with traditional vocabulary teaching method,to what extent does corpus-based vocabulary teaching affect students' comprehension of vocabulary? Third,compared with traditional vocabulary teaching method,to what extent does corpus-based vocabulary teaching affect students' application of vocabulary?Based on these three questions,the author used Corpus of Contemporary American English as the experimental corpus.Through vocabulary size test and some analysis of some related-tests data which include descriptive analysis,independent sample T-test and paired sample T-test with the help of SPSS 21.0,the author found that:(1)the force-feeding traditional vocabulary teaching method has some defects that cannot be ignored,the vocabulary teaching process is single and lacks vitality,and the students' final memorization effect is unsatisfactory;on the contrary,corpus provides learners enough language inputs and unique methods of materials presentation and processing,corpus-based vocabulary teaching can facilitate students' memorization of vocabulary effectively.(2)Compared with traditional vocabulary teaching method,corpus-based vocabulary teaching can facilitate learners' understanding of words' pronunciation,form and meaning effectively.(3)Compared with traditional vocabulary teaching method,corpus-based vocabulary teaching methods can effectively improve students' ability of language output and promote their communicative competence.This study provides some pedagogical implications.First,English teaching should ground firmly in authentic language materials and take advantage of modern technology to arousing students' interest and cultivating their thinking ability and creativity.Second,corpus-based vocabulary teaching method can stimulate students' awareness of autonomous learning and promote their language acquisition.Third,the application of corpus-based vocabulary teaching can be divided into three stages on the whole: firstly,in the phase of preparation before class,original language materials from certain corpus should be selected and adjusted to adapt to the learning level of students;secondly,in the phase of vocabulary teaching during class,a large amount of student-centered learning activities,for example,the discussion of word in certain register or the discussion of vocabulary collocation,should be designed and carried out according to teaching contents.Besides,in consideration of the complexity of corpus operation and the variety of corpus materials,teachers should provide appropriate assistance and constantly adjust teaching strategies according to the actual learning situations of students;thirdly,in the phase of consolidation after class,some related exercises can be designed with the help of the authentic language materials from corpus to help students learn the knowledge they have learnt during the class.Finally,there are some shortcomings in this paper: because the experimental period is short,the number of the participants involved in the research is small and the effectiveness of corpus was tested only through the output of vocabulary,thus more efforts are needed to further improve it.