Chapter One Introduction
It has become an acknowledged fact that vocabulary plays such an essential andvital role in the whole process of the language learning and teaching that it has directlyimpact on the improvement of the four skills like listening, speaking, reading, andwriting. However, at present, there exist some factors, which exert negative influencesin the acquisition of the vocabulary in English language classroom instruction.Especially in Senior High School, English vocabulary acquisition and teachingfollows traditional ways, that is vocabulary is learned and presented in isolated withmore focus on the mechanical drills and rote memorization. Consequently, teachersspend a lot of time and energy，but the effect is undesirable. What’s worse, studentsare in a passive role in vocabulary acquisition and teaching, which violates the conceptof "student-centered" thinking.However, how to teach and learn English vocabulary more effectively is alwaysan important issue worth exploring and studying. Thus, in this paper, a corpus-basedapproach, namely, Data-driven learning, will be used to explore a more effective wayof lexical teaching. Corpora not only have the advantage of providing large databasesof naturally- occurring discourse so that analyses can be based on real structures andpatterns of use rather than perceptions and intuitions but also provide an approach tolanguage, Data-driven learning (DDL), in which students work with “raw”information taken directly from corpora. Initially proposed by Tim Johns in 1991,DDL is regarded as a new corpus-based approach to foreign language learning andteaching (FLLT) and a challenge to the traditional FLLT of which is usually teacher-or-textbook-centered.This paper reports the application of DDL model to the English VocabularyTeaching in Senior High School. Focus is laid on solving problems including: whatproblems existed at senior high school, how to get relevant corpus for learners, howto design corpus-aided activity, how to make corpus manageable in classroomteaching and how to enhance teaching practice by corpus research. This study will bring the corpus and the theory of DDL to the senior high schoolclass, applying it to vocabulary acquisition and teaching, and attempt to find out itsrole in cultivate student’s English learning ability. Its purposes can be illustrated asfollows.Firstly, it is intended to reveal the current status and existing problems in theEnglish Vocabulary Teaching in Senior High School.It then explores how to apply the technology of corpus and the theory of DDL tothe English Vocabulary Teaching in Senior High School after careful analysis anddiscussion, attempting to arouse the concerns of teachers and aiming at improving theeffectiveness of the teaching vocabulary.Lastly, this thesis explores how to put corcondencing materials into practice tosee whether corpus presented through Data-driven learning (the DDL) approach haveany effect on English vocabulary teaching in Senior High School or not.Therefore, its theoretical and practical significance lies mainly in three ways.Firstly, it provides a new perspective on vocabulary teaching in senior highschool in order to change the undesirable situation in vocabulary acquisition andteaching that students are always in passive roles whereas teachers are the centers ofthe process of learning.Secondly, this study can be seen as an attempt to integrate corpus to the theoryof DDL to the English Vocabulary Teaching in Senior High School with the aim offinding out a more effective way of designing vocabulary lessons.Finally, it is beneficial to the development of students’ autonomous learningabilities by means of experiencing, practicing, participating, exploring andcooperating. By adopting the DDL approach, learners can “feel” the authenticlanguage, arouse their interests in English learning, help them experience the sense ofsuccess and gain confidence in learning in ways of self-exploration, self-discoveryand self-deduction learning.
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Chapter Two Literature Review
2.1 Vocabulary learning and teaching
English learners' performance on vocabulary has a close relationship with theirperformance on reading, listening comprehension and other forms of languageproficiency tests (Nation & Meara, 2008).Language learning involves learning sounds, grammar, and vocabulary in whichvocabulary is an indispensable part of second language acquisition. The necessities ofvocabulary learning and memorizing are beyond any doubt, but the ways of learningand teaching vocabulary remain as an everlasting filed to be explored.Followings are reasons to highlight the significance of vocabulary learning inSLA.Firstly, vocabulary is the building material of language. Hammer (1990) oncesaid: “vocabulary is the flesh, while language organization is the bones of language”.Secondly, syntactic rules are limited and relatively fixed, while vocabulary isunlimited. With a high vocabulary level, even if you master the minimum organization,you could express much more than those with almost all organizations and smallvocabulary. Thirdly, vocabulary has a crucial impact on language competence acceleration.No text comprehension is possible, either in one’s native language or in a foreignlanguage, without understanding the vocabulary (Laufer, 1997).Hence, vocabulary is central to language and of critical importance to the typicallanguage learner.
2.2 Corpus and corpus linguistics
With the aim to make a study of language which is corpus-based, it is extremelynecessary for us to have some knowledge of corpus and corpus linguistics. Here,before moving on to discussing the pedagogic applications of corpus that are closestto these concerns, I would like to briefly introduce the notion of corpus and thelinguistic approach which provides a theoretical motivation for its analysis. First things first, as DDL is based on the corpus, the definition of corpus isexamined first. The word “corpus,” stemmed from the Latin word of which themeaning is “body,” means any collections of written or spoken texts. As to the writtentexts, they can be extracts from fictions, books, or magazines, etc. As to the spokentexts, they can be any recorded formal or informal conversations, business meetingsetc., to name just a few.Generally, linguists have often used the word corpus to depict a collection ofnaturally occurring language examples, including anything from several sentences totape recordings or a set of written texts accumulated for linguistic study. Over the past years, the compilation and analysis of corpora stored incomputerized databases has led to a new scholarly enterprise known as corpuslinguistics. It is perhaps safe at present to say that the main focus of corpus linguisticsis to discover patterns of authentic language use through analysis of actual usage.With the emergence of machine-readable corpora and rapid development ofcorpus-based research, corpus linguistics is establishing itself as a new approach inlanguage study. In fact, any attempt to define corpus linguistics at present is only tentative, forcorpus linguistics, as a science, is still developing, and developing at a tremendouspace. Corpus linguistics is not a new theory of language, or a new branch of linguistics,but rather a new or renewed approach to language study. On the one hand, the use ofcorpus evidence introduces a new approach to linguistic study. On the other hand, theuse of corpus as a source of evidence is not necessarily incompatible with anylinguistic theory. Corpus-based evidence allows us to develop teaching materials thatare more helpful and accurate for learning vocabulary of all levels.
Chapter Three The rationale for a DDL-based vocabulary instruction at seniorhigh school ...................................................13
3.1 Current Situation and Problems in Senior High School VocabularyTeaching................................................13
3.2 DDL as a solution to the problems ................................14
Chapter Four DDL Vocabulary Teaching Model and its implementation ..... 16
Chapter Five Conclusion .................................40
5.1 Major findings of the present study ...........................40
Chapter Four DDL Vocabulary Teaching Model and itsimplementation
4.1 An Introduction to Task-Based Language Teaching
As a relatively new teaching methodology, Task-based Language Teaching isrecommended as an effective teaching approach and a great challenge for teachers toteach, students to learn and course books to design. It requires teachers to transferfrom a controller into a designer, director, a manager, and a helper and demandstudents from passive learners into student-centered learners. Since the core concept of TBLT is the task, it is firstly necessary to give adefinition of what is a task. Different researchers like LONG, Breen, Littlejohn,Skehan, Willis, Ellis, Nunan and so on, have given their own explanation or concepton what is a task in that it is quite difficult to define the term “task”.In brief, a task is an activity that requires learners to use the target language, withmeaning at the core, to achieve an objective, and Task-based language teaching is anEnglish teaching approach in which students learn English through doing. (A) The authenticity principleThe linguistic data for learners to work with should be authentic. Task shouldprovide learners with explicit and authentic information from the real world.(B) The form-function principleIn designing a task, special attention must be paid to combine the linguistic formwith language function. The tasks in every step should have a definite guiding purposeon the basis of learning language form. The students can learn the language functionand the skills of communication through performing a series of tasks.(C) The task dependency principleTasks should be designed in the order from simplest to the most complex andeasiest to the most difficult. A series of tasks in a unit of work or in a semester forms a kind of pedagogical ladder, each task representing a rung on the ladder, enabling thelearner to reach higher and higher levels of communicative performance.(D) Learning by doing principleThe teachers should direct learners to learn language by performing specificactivities, to conduct language activities for the special purposes and enjoy thehappiness of success through completing certain communicative tasks.(E) Scaffolding principleScaffolding is a process of ‘setting up’ the situation to make the learning processeasy and successful. In the light of this statement, the task of a teacher is to create theconditions in which learning can take place. In other words, teachers should act as afacilitator of learning.In class, teachers should create rich learning experience by offering a multiplicityof authentic learning tasks. While students are doing task, the teacher should walkaround the classroom and observe how well the students are doing. If students are notdoing the right task, the teachers can give them help. When the students are not surehow to start a task, or what to do next, or how to express themselves in proper targetlanguage, the teacher should give necessary prompts. In TBLT, the task, is used to give students practice in what they have beenlearning. Students learn through using language, by struggling with meaning.Jane presents the TBLT framework into three phases: the pre-task phase(introduction to topic and task), Task Cycle (Task-Planning-Report), and LanguageFocus (Analysis and practice) (see also Willis, 1996)A. Pre-task phaseAt the pre-task phase, teachers should define the learning outcomes (e.g. whatstudents will be learning in terms of mastery of the subject matter), objectives of thetask.B. Task Cycle phaseAt task cycle phase, it is time for students to perform the task inpidually or ingroups in the class and they may take turns in presenting their final work. Oralpresentations are required and a paper is usually submitted during presentations. While performing the tasks, teachers should encourage students to opencommunication as fully as possible. Teacher acts as a moderator but most of the timebehaves like a member of the audience, constantly providing encouragement andmotivation. During in-class presentations, it is advisable to make notes about thestudent’s or group’s performance taking into consideration both good and bad points.All in all, teachers make themselves available anytime to offer guidance and supportbut not correction of workC. Post-Task phaseAt the post-task phase, teachers should give students time to reflect on theirpresentations and assess their performance. Allow students to look into the process ofdoing the task, to review again the analytical perspective they used in presenting theirwork, and ask themselves how much of the texts/ideas/vocabulary used in the readingsand discussions were used in their presentations.
4.2 An introduction to the self-built corpus and tool
To work with DDL, students need some basic technological expertise both oncorpus and tool. At the very beginning, corpus linguistics can seem very daunting, andteacher educators should be careful not to frighten students off with seeminglycomplex statistics and computations. It is crucial, we have found, to start with a basicdistinction between a corpus, which is essentially a collection of texts (see Biber,Conrad, & Reppen, 1998), and the software that one can use to analyze it. Teacherswho choose to use corpora in their language classrooms will need to be discerningabout software and corpora, and, at the most basic level, they will need to know thecommon functions and applications of the available software.If we are intended to implement the DDL vocabulary teaching model in seniorhigh classroom, we should make the corpus-informed or corpus-based language inputmanageable in classroom teaching and spare our efforts to improve the presentationformat and techniques. this research is based on a self-built and relatively smallmonolingual corpus which I name it as ETCHS (English Teaching Corpus for HighSchool), compiled at the Gannan Normal University by the author himself in 2013according to student’s needs and preferences. The corpus used by the author in thisresearch is various texts from a range of sources, with a total word count of about 0.5million words in five sections: 0.3 million words of the complete readingcomprehension materials extracted from National Matriculation English Test (from2000 to 2013); 45,000 words of New Senior English for China Student's Book (fromModule 1 to Module 9); 65,000 words of the reading comprehension exercisesmaterials at senior high school students level (250 pieces); 20,000 words of shortstories (66 pieces) and 40,000 words of New Concept English (book 2 and book 3).According to its structure and content, the ETCHS was designed for the Englishteaching in senior high school in that all the reading materials are at the high schoolstudents’ level and in accordance with the English curriculum criteria for middleschool.
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Chapter Five Conclusion
Chapter Five Conclusion The general purpose of present study is devoted to theoretical discussions andpractical applications of the Data-driven learning model to vocabulary teaching atsenior high school. The major findings can be stated from three aspects.Firstly, it revealed the current status and existing problems in the Englishvocabulary teaching at senior high school from three perspectives. Its meaning lies inthe indications that we can improve the vocabulary present situation from these threeaspects. Therefore, a supplementary method is provided and it is suggested that weshould make the most of the advantages and the least of disadvantages of DDL modelfrom a pedagogical perspectiveSecondly, it is admittedly that building a corpus needs a lot of time, energy, andhelp from different parties. This study is based on a specialized self-built EnglishTeaching Corpus for High School (I name it as ETCHS) with understandable materials.It is true to say that a conscientious use of a proper corpora overall has been a valuableteaching resource for high school classes and can arouse their interests in workingwith authentic data over the material presented in the textbook. Most of the studentsbelieve DDL is an interesting and effective method to learn vocabulary and enhancevocabulary competence.Thirdly, in this present study, it makes several cases for the inclusion of corpuslinguistics in senior high school language teaching and lays out the basic DDLvocabulary teaching model which can be used by any teachers easily. It provides theconcrete suggestions on what an ordinary teacher can do with corpora in daily teachingand what a student can do with corpora in promoting language study.
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