A Study On The Learning Of English Lexical Chunks

Traditionally, language learning is divided into grammar and vocabulary. Due to the intangibility of words, most of the learning and teaching focus is laid on structural elements. But in recent years, more and more experts and teachers are choosing to believe vocabulary is central to language and of critical importance to the language learners, as held by Michael West. It is generally thought that the primary thing in learning a language is the acquisition of vocabulary and the practice in using it.However, in accordance with the latest development of the cognitive and psycholinguistic theories, vocabulary is by no means learned in an isolated way as in traditional word list, but is often learned in lexical chunks with several words long. Corpus in his study shows language is composed of thousands of different categories of chunks. Chunking is an inherent nature of language as well as the way we human minds process.In a sense, the traditional grammar/vocabulary dichotomy is invalid; collocation is at least as important as syntactic rules in language learning. Its blocking role must not be undervalued.Important as it is, collocation is not naturally learned in the second language (L2) acquisition as in the first one (L1). Many difficulties face the L2 learners for various reasons. So it often falls into the negligence which naturally constitutes an obstacle to native accuracy and fluency.In this paper, the author firstly makes a literature review concerning the study of lexical collocations, and casts a paramount view of the various categories of lexis. And then the author analyses the status of lexical chunks in language acquisition and points out a good many of problems in teaching and learning. In the end, the author presents a collocation approach to vocabulary and language learning, in which the teachers' role is to raise the learners' collocation awareness and build up their collocation competence which is vital to successful communications, by means of various fruitful activities and exercises. While elaborating on the merits, the author also predicts the possible difficulties and problems and comes up with solutions.