New Way to Lexical Acquisition: Approach of Corpus-Based Data Driven Learning

English proficiency is playing an important role in nearly every aspect of life: further education, job-huntng and career development. Lexical competence is regarded as one of the key factors to English learning. With traditional teaching method, students focus mostly on memorization of individual words and usage, which turn out to be boring and ineffective. The corpus-based data driven learning (DDL) approach, namely learning vocabulary and phrases through a large collection of structured and authentic text stored in a computer, may heralded as the answer to some of the problems which students face in lexical acquisition. This paper attempts to demonstrate the problems that most Chinese students face in lexical learning and to outline the benefits of DDL approach to lexical acquisition and how the course was designed to integrate DDL into classroom instruction.