| English writing is one of the most difficult language skills for English majors.Much effort has been made in this aspect on the part of both teachers and students.However, students’ writing ability is still far from satisfactory. Many researchers inboth abroad and inland have found that learners’ competence of lexical application isone of the key factors, that is，writing competence in foreign language is closelyrelated to lexical ability. Melk（1997）found that the student who has large vocabularymay not be a good writer and his productive skill in lexicon is the key factor. But thetraditional textbook-centered approach suffers from the following weaknesses: lack ofnaturalness, non-novelty，inadequate examples and narrow input, the above of whichare the main reasons for less input and students’ boredom.Data-Driven Learning is a new corpus-based method which is first mentioned byTim Johns in1990s. Its basic principle is guiding students observe, generalize andconclude the patterns of language usage and self-find grammar patterns, meanings andpragmatic characteristics. It changes learners learning strategies, learning materialsand learning methods.The Corpus of Contemporary American English(COCA)，built by Mark Daviesin Brigham Young University, is one of the best English corpora till now and it hasbeen free online since February,2008. The text materials come from all aroundAmerica in the fields of spoken, fiction, newspaper, magazine and academic. It is abalanced corpus and has450million words from the year1990to2012and anothernew20million words will be added each year. It is not only a window to observe theusage and change of American English, but also an ideal treasury for English learners.This paper, integrating process approach with DDL, guides students to applyCOCA, which is regarded as a teaching platform, to improve their lexical abilityduring prewriting, writing, revising periods. This paper proposes a hypothesis: COCAcan be helpful in improving the Chinese English-major-students’ competence of lexical application. Based on the hypothesis, the paper should answer the followingquestions:1) Is it difficult for English majors to read the material in COCA? And howmuch degree it is?2) Can COCA be helpful to improve student’s lexical richness?3) How should COCA be applied in the periods of English writing?Qualitative and quantitative methods are employed in this study. They includeexperimental method, questionnaire, interview, test, etc. Some other methods, such asJukuu (a station which can correct students’ composition automatically by computer),Range3.2and AntConc (corpus tools), are also used to get and analyze data. Lexicalrichness consists of lexical density (LD), lexical variation (LV) and lexicalsophistication (LS). Lexical density (LD) measures the proportion of lexical words inall words. Lexical variation is computed by type-token ratio (TTR). Lexicalsophistication (LS) is revealed through “Lexical Frequency Profile”(LFP) which wasdesigned specially for L2learners to work out the percentage of2000high-frequencyword families, Academic Word families (AWL) and word families beyond the twocategories (Off-the-list).The major findings in this thesis are summarized in the following four aspects:First of all, it is possible for English majors to use COCA directly in English writingcourse.80%of the words in the materials selected from COCA by random samplingare in the three basic wordlists and nearly70%of the words which are not in the threebasic wordlists are proper nouns which students can guess the meanings. That meansthe proper nouns will not stand in their way for the students to understand the text.From the test paper, we know that undergraduate student can translate most thesentences in random sampling. The second major finding in the thesis is that theexperimental group has made much great progress than the control group in lexicalrichness. The third major finding is that COCA used during brainstorming beforewriting can help to stimulate students’ thinking, figure out brilliant thought, whichespecially appears in expository writing. But during the “writing” period, it is notreadily apparent. One reason is that computers in writing classroom have not been set up for networking and teachers and students cannot retrieve information in COCAdirectly. Another reason is that retrieval during the writing may confuse the train ofthe thought. COCA used in revising period may be helpful to improve the students’competence of lexical application, to make their writing more authentic andappropriate. The fourth finding is that if COCA is used in conjunction with Englishdictionary, the effects will be better.Though a new way has been found in developing competence of lexicalapplication in English writing, the research, inevitably, is limited and imperfect inmany aspects. Firstly, the improvement of writing ability is a long, complicatedprocess, but the experiment experienced only10months, so some data this paper gotdoes not sound persuasive. Secondly, in experimental group, the gap between theexcellent students and the poor ones widened, but the problem has not been solved.Thirdly, this paper only involves the students’ competence of lexical application, doesnot touch on many other aspects, which are also very important in improving writingability, such as syntax, text, stylistics, and culture. |
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