An Empirical Research Of The Effect Of Lexical Approach On College Students' English Ability

At present,the students' English learning effect in the vocational colleges is not ideal,and most of the students are not able to use English smoothly and freely.A large number of studies,based on Michael Lewis' lexical approach and Nattinger&De Carrico's chunk theory,have shown that the feature of lexical chunk with being stored or extracted as a whole can not only effectively overcome a lot of mistakes made by learners because of temporary combination of vocabulary and grammar,but also reduce the burden of language processing.Therefore,using lexical approach in classroom is conducive to improve the students' English ability and their language fluency.In recent years,although there is a growing increase of research about lexical chunks both at home and abroad,the empirical research,especially about vocational college students,is still less than the theoretical research.This article attempts to investigate whether the lexical approach can improve college students' English ability or not.The subjects are from two parallel classes of mathematics education in Tie Ling Normal College.During the experiment,the experimental class adopts lexical approach,while the control class adopts traditional teaching methods.The students of the two classes have identical background knowledge and teaching materials and are taught by the same teacher.Through analyzing their results obtained in the past paper of PRETCO A in the pre-test and post-test,whether the learner's comprehensive performance is related to the application of lexical approach and the extent of its impact on the students' discrete skills,as well as its enlightenment to English teaching will be inspected.The experiment testifies the effectiveness of applying lexical approach to the college students' classroom teaching,which can help students grasp more lexical chunks so as to improve their English ability step by step.There might be some deficiencies in this research and the experiment will continue to be deepened in the future.