An Empirical Study On The Corpus-based Strategy Of Vocabulary Learning In A Second Language

The writing of this paper has been initiated by a practical concern and a theoretical inspiration. The practical concern lies in the unprecedented passion of English learning environment in China, and the great challenge of vocabulary learning facing both English majors and non-English majors. The theoretical inspiration comes from constructivism and discovery learning.This thesis centers around the vocabulary learning in corpus-based contexts. The main body of the paper is divided into three parts. The first part aims at providing a clear, multi-dimensional definition for vocabulary knowledge, and the proposition of learning vocabulary in corpus-based context, based on which the rest of the paper will develop. The second part intends to give theoretical supports to this proposition, and render an insightful view on it by reviewing the influential theoretical achievements in relevant domains of psychological research and second language acquisition study and linking them to the author's proposition. The literature review covers Constructivism and Discovery Learning in the field of learning theory and Noticing theory and Depth of Processing in the field of cognitive psychology and that of SLA. The foci are researches on the role of concordancing to the effect of vocabulary learning. Researches reviewed include Tom Cobb, Chris Greaves and Marlise Horst's R-Read program and Goodfellow' "Lexica" program. Part three reports on an empirical study, which was been conducted by the author in the hope of testing the effect of concordancing in intentional vocabulary learning in the aspect of retention and word knowledge. The results have been analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively and the author finds out that concordancing combined with dictionary could result in a better learning outcome. Samples of using concordancing in vocabulary learning and teaching are proposed in the last section of this part.