| Lexical richness is an important indicator of the quality of learners writings and communication, and inrecent years it has obtained more and more attention from researchers. But since the traditional writing teachingapproach is lack of language naturalness and rich examples, the students can t get enough language input andquickly improve the lexical richness in their writings. The corpora which have risen in recent years can greatlyenrich the content of English learning and effectively improve learning strategies. In view of this, the presentstudy proposed the hypothesis that the corpus-assisted writing instruction is more beneficial than the traditionalteaching in improving the lexical richness in students writings.In this study, the teaching experiment was carried out for a semester, with two classes of second-yearnon-English majors from Gansu Normal University for Nationalities as the subjects. The students of theexperimental group were guided to make full use of the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) inall the stages of writing process to learn the relevant vocabulary and grammar with the aim of improving thelexical richness in their writings. This study observed the changes of the lexical richness before and after theexperimental treatment from three aspects: lexical variation, lexical sophistication and lexical errors. Amongthem, the lexical variation was obtained through the formula:(log tokens)2/(log tokens-log types); the lexicalsophistication was measured through the Lexical Frequency Profile finished by the software Range32; for thelexical errors, firstly, the errors in the students writings were tagged from spelling, morpho-syntactic, andsemantic dimensions, and then AntConc3.2.4was used to do the statistics. Finally, for all the quantitative data,several comparison tests were made between the control group and the experimental group in the pre-test and thepost-test. In addition, in order to investigate the students attitudes toward the corpus-assisted writing teaching,the students of EG were interviewed after the post-test, and the qualitative data from the interview was alsocollected and analyzed.The study results showed that the corpus-assisted writing instruction was more beneficial than thetraditional teaching in improving the lexical richness in students writings. The specific findings include:1) theCOCA-assisted writing teaching approach was more effective than the traditional teaching in improving thelexical variation in students writings. For EG, there was significant difference between the pre-test and thepost-test. Meanwhile, at the pre-test, there was no significant difference between EG and CG, but at the post-test,there appeared significant difference between EG and CG.2) Compared with the traditional teaching, thecorpus-assisted writing instruction was not quite effective in improving the lexical sophistication during a short period. That was because the students couldn t change the learned words into the productive vocabulary in sucha short term.3) Compared with the traditional teaching, the corpus-assisted writing teaching was more conducivein decreasing the lexical morpho-syntactic and semantic errors, but not in the spelling errors of students writings.4) The students held positive attitudes toward the application of COCA in English writing teaching andvocabulary learning. In addition, the study also showed that in short period the traditional approach was not quiteefficient in increasing the lexical richness in students writings. Based on the above findings, the study finallyconcluded several pedagogical implications.This was only a tentative study about the application of large corpora in college English teaching. Limitedby factors such as short research time and small number of subjects, some data this paper has got was not quitepersuasive, and the long-term effect of the corpus-assisted approach needs to be testified in the further research. |
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