A type of adaptive finite element method is presented for semilinear elliptic problems based on multilevel correction scheme. The main idea of the method is to transform the semilinear elliptic equation into a sequence of linearized boundary value problems on the adaptive partitions and some semilinear elliptic problems on very low dimensional finite element spaces. Hence, solving the semilinear elliptic problem can reach almost the same efficiency as the adaptive method for the associated boundary...