Abstract:

Sociocultural theory (SCT) emphasizes the important role of language in the development of human cognition and mental function and it believes that the mental function of people develops from a lower level to a higher level， namely， regulation develops from object-regulation to other-regulation and then gradually to self-regulation. With the development of the Internet and information technology， corpus has been gradually applied to second language acquisition. The effect of DDL (data-driven learning) on German vocabulary acquisition from SCT perspective was explored and the results indicated that that as learning time increases， learners ability to acquire vocabulary is improving. Different regulations may exert different effects. The beginners are mainly affected by object-regulation and the intermediate learners have begun to fulfil their learning tasks by other-regulation. Yet， the advanced learners are mainly influenced by self-regulation.

Key words: sociocultural theory (SCT), regulation, data-driven learning (DDL), vocabulary acquisition