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Chapter 1 Int roduction

1.1 Background of the Study
It is well known that vocabulary is an important part of language learning andteaching for teachers and students. Recently, a number of studies and researches havebeen carried on to exp lore and discover some effective and scientific approaches ofvocabulary teaching. However, someapproaches mostly aim at a large vocabulary sizein senior high schools.Students’ capability of using English vocabulary has beenignored. Therefore, there are still so me problems when studentsattem pt tocommunicate with others.According to the new curricu lum standard of English course in China, Englishvocabulary teaching should focus on understanding the d eep meaning of a wor dwhich means teachers should attach importance to flexibility and appropriacy of worduse. Nowadays, most of the teachers have realized the great importance of vocabularyteaching, but their methods are simple, m echanical and rigid. Some teachers onlyprovide as many words and expressions as they can without carefully explaining howto use them in different situations andask students to memorize mechanically. Whilestudents just memorize the words by rote for the purpose of exam inations, whichleads to hig h rate of for getting and confusion during lang uage learning. Becausestudents lack the experience to perceive the words in real contexts, their capacity ofcomprehending and applying the words cannot be greatly improved. It is the reasonwhy some teachers invest so much energy and time to their students, but make littleachievement.
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1.2Significance of the Study
For a long time, it is admitted that the methods of English vocabulary teachingfor senior high school students are always teacher-centered, which means teachers arethe authority in the learning process. Howe ver, this kind of tr aditional vocabularyteaching nowadays is an extrem ely inflexible form. It leads to som e problems ofvocabulary learning of students, especially in the aspect of students’language output.While the corpus is a powerful tool for teachers and students to overcom e theabove problems. According to Hunston (2002), an English corpus can be directly usedas teaching materials for students in English class. Because the corpora display theauthentic language, those typical collocations and word usage will help learners in amore scientific way, compared with teachers’intuition or other incorrect explanations.Learning a word is not only knowing its pronunciation, spelling and meaning,but also its context, sem antic meaning, stylistic register and so on. Only in this w aycan students be familiar with the word and know how to use it in real life. Corpus canpresent a number of contextualized examples and let teachers focus on these lexic alaspects. Students will develop their ability to observe and discover,and their roles asexplorers will cultivate students’language insight into vocabulary learning.
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Chapter 2 Literature Review

In this chapter, the author will elaborate some academic support for this thesis. F irstpart is vocabulary and vocabulary knowledge and second part will present som einformation about corpus. Then the rela tionship between corpus and Englishvocabulary teaching will be follo wed. And f ourth part is abou t the theo reticalfoundation of corpus-b ased English voca bulary teaching, which include Bruner ’sDiscovery Learningand Data-Driven Learning fr