An Empirical Study Of The Usage-based Teaching Model Of Lexical Chunnks For College English Learning

With the rapid development of the international communication and cooperation, the importance of English which is the world language has been increasing all the time, so that all the colleges and universities attach great importance to English teaching. As the important part of language teaching, Vocabulary teaching always plays a critical role in the teaching. As one of the three basic elements of language, vocabulary will directly affect the comprehensive application ability of language. Therefore, the status of vocabulary teaching in language teaching is self-evident.The author of the present research found some problems in students’ English vocabulary. They can be summarized as follows during her teaching of the College English program. Firstly, there exists the problem in memorizing and retrieving the vocabulary. Large amount of vocabulary in College English textbooks cause the burden of memory for students that they may be easy to forget, or may lead to the lexical confusion phenomenon. Secondly, there are some problems about students’ sentence expressions. The problems like vocabulary misuses, improper collocation problems, and Chinglish can be easily found in students’ oral expressions and writings. Thus their accuracy and fluency of sentence expressions need to improve. Thirdly, students’ motivation in learning English is low. In the traditional English teaching mode, the purpose of students’ learning English and reciting vocabulary is only to pass the relevant examinations. Such learning motivation will affect the development of students’ learning effect of the course and their comprehensive application ability of the language. So their motivation in learning English vocabulary should be further aroused. Therefore the purpose of the present study is to explore ways to help students better memorize and retrieve the vocabulary in the limited classroom time, and to improve their application ability and learning enthusiasm of the vocabulary. Guided by the usage-based cognitive grammar and the related second language theories and taking lexical chunks as the basic language units, the author composed the usage-based teaching model of English lexical chunks(Ub-ELC) for the students learning College English.The Ub-ELC teaching model divides vocabulary teaching into the following four processes: creating context, experiencing input, consolidating intake and promoting output. Creating context refers to the creation of a certain context according to the language knowledge. The context includes cognitive context, situational context and cultural context. Experiencing input refers to adopting various methods to help learners input, such as auditory input(hearing), visual input(reading) and listening input(videos, movies, CDS, etc.) to promote students’ effective acquisition. Consolidating intake refers to adopting various methods to lead learners to increase the contact frequency of the lexical chunks, and help them take in new lexical chunks into their existing knowledge system. Prompting output refers to adopting various ways to let the students have more opportunities to master and use the lexical chunks in interactive language communication activities, and let them experience the real application of the language. The Ub-ELC teaching model was implemented in a class of 40 students in the Institute of Physical Education in Wenzhou University for two months. The author adopted such research methods as tests in vocabulary and writing, and questionnaire survey to investigate the effectiveness of the Ub-ELC teaching model. Analyzed by related statistical software, the results of the experiments are described as follows:(1)Students’ ability to memorize and retrieve the vocabulary has been improved.(2)Students’ language expressions are more accurate and fluent, and their writing level is also prompted.(3)Students’ motivation guided by the interests in College English has been gradually bettered.The findings above suggest that the Ub-ELC teaching model has obvious effectiveness on improvement of students’ comprehensive ability, motivation in learning English vocabulary, which is relevant to College English vocabulary teaching. However, because of the author’s limited research energy, the research has some limitations, such as the short experimental time, the small samples, and so on. The author will try to overcome the limitations as much as possible in the future research.