An Empirical Study On Lexical Chunks Strategy In Oral English Teaching Of Vocational College

Oral communicative competence is one of the targets that foreign language teachingspecifically pursues. It is also the most basic manifestation of a person’s English ability. Tocontradict the actual expectation, although many students can have good performance inwritten test, their performance on oral English is not optimistic, and they cannot accomplish areal communication task easily. At the same time, the traditional structural approach andcommunicative approach used in oral English teaching have certain limitations.Lexical chunks strategy is the intermediate zone between the traditional structuralapproach and communicative approach, and it gives attention to both accuracy and fluency inoral English teaching. To put simply, lexical chunk is the combination of grammar, semantics,and context, which has conditionality on its internal structure and meaning, and within it, onepart can help recall the other part, which is easier to be remembered than individual wordsdetached from the context, and it can be directly fetched and used. What’s more, lexical chunkteaching strategy is helpful in the increasing of fluency, continuity, and authenticity in oralexpression. Therefore, the author thinks that the buildup of lexical chunks provides a newpath for oral English teaching in vocational colleges. At present, although lexical chunksteaching strategy has been gradually applied to language teaching, especially in vocabularyand writing teaching, few scholars pay attention to the use of lexical chunks strategy in orallanguage teaching, and there is even less research in the application of lexical chunks in orallanguage teaching in vocational colleges. Therefore, the focus of this paper is the applicationof lexical chunks strategy in oral English teaching in vocational colleges and the analysis ofthe impact of lexical chunks teaching strategy to oral English ability of vocational collegestudents. So this study attempted to apply the lexical chunk teaching strategy to the oralEnglish teaching in higher vocational colleges, and tried to answer the following questionswith teaching experiments:1) Will the lexical chunks strategy help to increase the lexical chunks knowledge ofstudents?2) Will the lexical chunks strategy help to influence the fluency, accuracy, and idiomaticity of students’ oral English?3) Will the lexical chunks strategy help to enhance the teaching effect than traditionaloral English teaching method?Through analysis to the definition, classification, and theoretical basis of lexical chunks,as well as current situation of oral lexical chunks ability of vocational college students, theauthor performed empirical study to two parallel classes of students non-English major inShandong Vocational College of Industry where the author teaches. One of the classes is setas experimental class, the other the control class. During the whole process of experiment, theauthor has adopted research approaches such as questionnaire survey, observation, tests andinterviews, and has had strict and scientific statistical analysis to the data acquired. Thestatistical analysis of the experimental data shows that:1) The lexical chunks strategy canhelp to increase the lexical chunks knowledge of students.2) The lexical chunks strategyplays a very important role not only in the acquisition of language but also help to promotethe easy, fluency, accuracy and idiomaticity of language production.3) The lexical chunksstrategy can help to enhance the teaching effect than traditional oral English teaching method.The lexical chunks strategy can better enhance students’ oral ability of expression thantraditional oral English teaching method. Lexical chunks strategy advocates the memorizationand accumulation of big amount of lexical chunks in English learning. This will not onlyincrease students’ sense of achievement in English learning, but also make their languageoutput more fluent, proper, and coherent, and thus optimize communication effectiveness. Butin this research process, the author also found that there exist some difficulties and limitationsduring the detail implementation of lexical chunks teaching process, which needs to be further,improved with the combination of reality in vocational college classroom teaching of oralEnglish.