Lexical Chunks In The Cultivation Of English Communicative Competence Of Vocational College Students

In recent years the English communicative competence has been greatly emphasized inESL teaching. But due to the fact that the English level of the vocational students iscomparatively poor than that of the students in universities, the cultivation of theircommunicative competence has been laborious but bearing few outcomes. Under theenlightenments of foreign and domestic scholars’findings in lexical chunks, the authorconducts this study aiming to find out whether teaching through lexical chunks can enhancethe cultivation of Communicative Competence in vocational colleges and to explore someeffective teaching strategies.The author selected two classes in Zibo Vocational Institute to participate this study:one (P10 Construction Cost Class Five) being the experimental class and the other (P10Construction Cost Class Six) being the control class and carried out chunk teachingexperiments. Before the experiment the author made a pretest to find out whether the twoclasses had the same language proficiency level. In the following questionnaire survey andinterview the author found that the students’knowledge about English communicativecompetence is quite limited, so she started by explaining relevant English communicativecompetence knowledge to them. Afterwards, the author applied lexical approach into theteaching of the experimental class while in the control class she taught in the traditionalteaching pattern. After the experiment which lasted 4 months from March 3rdto July 5thin theyear of 2011, the author tested the participants again to check whether their Englishcommunicative competence has got improved. Then another questionnaire and interviewwere held to know about the participants’opinions about the lexical teaching approach inEnglish communicative competence cultivation. The results show that the Englishcommunicative competence of the experimental class taught through lexical approach hasbeen increased evidently. Students in the experimental class have displayed betterperformances in both oral and written communicating tasks; their language became morefluent, accurate and coherent in use and their linguistic competence, pragmatic competence, discourse competence and strategic competence have got better at varying degrees. Whereasthe control class taught in the usual way, did not make much progress, which clearlyillustrates that lexical chunks have taken active effects in enhancing vocational collegestudents’English communicative competence and consequently promoting the students’second language acquisition. From the follow-up questionnaire and interview the authorsurprisingly discovered that lexical chunks leave a lasting positive effect on students’confidence in ESL learning and they generate more interest and enthusiasm in Englishlearning. The major findings of the experiment reveal that teaching lexical chunks in class isquite effective. And the author also suggests some practical teaching strategies which can beadopted to better satisfy the vocational college students’needs.Despite limitations of the experiment the author believes that this study could be ofsome value for future research on lexical chunk teaching and be of some help to improve thecultivation of English communicative competence in more specific aspects, especially tothose students in vocational colleges.