Research On The Application Of The Lexical Approach To ESP Vocabulary Learning

With the development of society and economy, the trend of globalization becomes indispensable to the world. Since China entered the WTO, English, especially business English, has become more and more important in China. BE (business English) is regarded as the most vital variety of ESP (English for Special Purpose).Since the beginning of 1960s, many English learners have been trying to find a shortcut to the learning of English so as to have access to the advanced technology and culture knowledge of the west world. ESP has become popular ever since then. In their learning of English, vocabulary has always been seen as the most difficult element. Michael Lewis proposed the lexical approach in 1983, which has been proved to be an effective method to learn not only vocabulary, but also reading and writing. Nowadays, students of junior college in China are the direct participants of learning ESP, but a number of surveys show that students of junior college get no improvement in the school. So the method of teaching and learning English in junior college needs to be changed. In order to improve the effectiveness of teaching and learning ESP vocabulary in junior college, I have chosen this topic to explore the application of the lexical approach to ESP vocabulary learning.The research consists of one questionnaire and one experiment. The questionnaire is to measure the attitude of students towards phrases/collocations. And the experiment is designed to test the effectiveness of the lexical approach. The results show that the lexical approach is a useful method for the students to learn ESP vocabulary.This thesis consists of the following chapters.Chapter One puts forward three basic questions and discusses the necessity of writing this thesis.Chapter Two introduces the background of the lexical approach as proposed by Michael Lewis in 1983. And it also introduces four types of lexical items, key principles and methodological principles.Chapter Three addresses the importance of chunks on language acquisition. It first analyzes chunks'impact on language acquisition from the angle of mental lexicon. And then it introduces its impact on mother language acquisition and second language learning respectively. The last section of the part analyzes the impact of the learning of collocations on second language acquisition.Chapter Four gives a detailed account of ESP, including its definition, origin, developments, ESP at present, ESP vocabulary, and current research on ESP.Chapter Five introduces the relationship between ESP and junior college English, relationship between BE and ESP, the research designs of the present study. It introduces the subjects to be investigated, the survey instrument and procedures of the research, criteria of test as well as the statistical instrument used for data analysis.Chapter Six is the conclusion of this thesis, in which the author summed up the major findings and recommendations for future research.