An Empirical Study On The Application Of Lexical Chunks Approach To Reading Instruction Of College English Teaching

Reading has been seen as a fast and efficient input to foreign language learners.Laufer(1996)finds that second language vocabulary and phrasal storage greatly influence learners' reading proficiency.Formed by various meaningful vocabularies,lexical chunks are regarded as fundamental elements of reading activity.Based on the lexical chunks approach(LCA)theory put forth by Lewis,the researcher conducts a survey of current college English teachers' awareness of lexical chunks and an empirical study of the effectiveness of lexical chunks approach(LCA)to the reading instruction of college English(RICE).The study aims to explore the following research questions:(1)What is the current situation of college English teachers' awareness of lexical chunks approach to the reading instruction of college English?(2)To what extent does the lexical chunks approach influence non-English majors' English reading proficiency in different types of reading tasks?(3)What are students' attitudes to the application of lexical chunks approach to reading instruction after the experimental teaching?The participants of the empirical survey are 40 college English teachers from Foreign Language School,Taizhou University for questionnaire and more than 10 college English reading classes for classroom observation.The participants involved in empirical teaching are 81 sophomores of two intact classes of non-English majors,Grade 2014,from Humanities College,Taizhou University.41 students in Class One are chosen as the experimental group(EG);40 students in Class Two are assigned as control group(CG).During 32 weeks experimental span,the pretest,mid-test and post-test are employed and the results are analyzed to explore the influence of lexical chunks approach on students' reading proficiency.8 students of different English levels from EG are selected for the interview to explore their attitudes to the application of lexical chunks approach to the teaching of reading when experimental teaching is finished.Detailed analysis of both quantitative and qualitative data has yielded the following major findings:1.More than half(60%)of the teachers have strong awareness of lexical chunks and basic knowledge of this approach.The majority of the teachers agree that Reformulate-Reflect model is an effective way to rectify grammar error.However,nearly 30% of the teachers are confused about the teaching model of the lexical chunks.It is found from the classroom observation that even though most teachers agree that the Observe-Hypothesis-Experiment teaching procedure is more effective,they do not really carry it out quite often in their classroom teaching.It is found that the lexical chunks approach has not drawn vast attention of teachers and has not been applied to reading instruction on a large scale at present.2.Both EG and CG have made some progress in fast reading,banked cloze and detailed reading after 32 weeks' teaching,but only the EG who have received lexical chunks approach in the reading instruction progressed significantly.Besides,differences in the progress made by EG in post-test and mid-test is found to be significant,especially in the task of detailed reading.Students in EG have made more conspicuous progress in post-test than they have in mid-test.It is also found that the students in EG have done significantly better in fast reading and banked cloze in their post-test than students in CG have.These findings indicate that lexical chunks approach indeed helps to improve students' reading proficiency.3.The lexical chunks approach has helped the intermediate and low level students better.Due to the adoption of lexical chunks approach,students in EG have developed better reading habit and have set up stronger confidence in English reading comprehension.Almost all the interviewed students speak highly of lexical chunks approach and acknowledge the effectiveness of this approach.Students feel they have got benefit from the prediction value of learned lexical chunks.It has helped intermediate and low level students rectify study attitude to eliminate their feeling of frustrations in English reading learning.The study reported here has some implications for college English teaching and learning,especially for RICE.Incorporating lexical chunks approach into EFL reading teaching is a good way to improve learners' reading proficiency,and thus should be advocated in EFL reading instruction.On one hand,for teachers who seek for innovative and effective reading teaching models and methods,the teaching procedures adopted in this study can be taken use of and adopted at their disposal.On the other hand,those low performers in college English reading are actually in great need of scientific learning methods.Once they are informed of scientific learning methods and instructed how to use these methods appropriately,these students are expected to make better and faster progress in reading.