A Study On The Function Of Lexical Approach In College Students’ Acquisition Of Vocabulary

Vocabulary is the key to language learning,the main bearer of language performance, and an important part of language teaching as well. But all these time, both teachers and students have been focusing on isolated words, paying attention to the pronunciation, spelling and meaning of a single word. This kind of vocabulary teaching will always result in various problems the learners have in memorizing,understanding and using the vocabulary. So how English language learners know about the vocabulary comprehensively and effectively becomes a problem that demands a prompt solution.Lexical approach has opened up a new way of vocabulary teaching.From the perspective of second language acquisition and cognitive theory, the paper tries to investigate the role that lexical approach plays in college students’vocabulary acquisition, including receptive vocabulary and productive vocabulary. The subjects of this experiment are81freshmen of2013,Yanbian University. All of them are non-English majors from two classes. The test lasted for16weeks. In this semester, the lexical approach was applied to the experimental class, while conventional vocabulary teaching to the control class. t the beginning of the experiment, students of two classes were given a pretest in receptive vocabulary and productive vocabulary. And at the end of the experiment they had a post-test and questionnaire so that the validity of the teaching experiment could be verified.In this study, Test of Vocabulary Size designed by Nation is used to measure receptive vocabulary and Lexical Frequency Profile (LFP), also designed by Nation,is used to measure productive vocabulary. All the experiment and questionnaire data is analyzed on SPSS17.0software. The result shows that the students in the experimental class have improved significantly both in receptive vocabulary and productive vocabulary, but there is no obvious change found in the control class. This indicates that the chunk-based lexical approach is really helpful in improving students’ acquiring receptive vocabulary and productive vocabulary. In addition, students in the experimental class hold a positive attitude towards lexical approach in their acquisition of vocabulary.What the study implies in college students’ vocabulary acquisition is as followed. Students should take advantage of word chunks to improve their acquisition of productive vocabulary, learning to identify, practice,consolidate and output chunks. And teachers should make chunk the basic unit of language teaching and further enhance students’sense of word chunks. They should also help students form the ability of acquiring chunks and teach students to use language corpus and other language material available.