An Experimental Study Of Lexical Chunk Approach In English Vocabulary Teaching In Senior High School

Vocabulary is one of the three major elements(phonetic,vocabulary,and grammar)of language,an important part of language and the core of the language system.Furthermore,vocabulary teaching plays an extremely important role in improving students’ English comprehensive ability of listening,speaking,reading and writing.Mastering the necessary vocabulary is the basic guarantee for smooth communication activities.However,traditional vocabulary teaching method takes vocabulary out of the specific context as a single word to explain,and asks students to memorize a large number of words mechanically.This teaching method has proved to be time-consuming,labor-intensive and inefficient.In the process of students’ use of vocabulary,problems such as vocabulary misspelling and improper vocabulary matching often occur.Therefore,it is necessary to use new vocabulary teaching methods to help students acquire vocabulary.Lexical Chunk Approach holds that language was not composed of traditional grammar and vocabulary,but was consisted of some prefabricated lexical chunks.When people use language,the generation of sentences is not to organize words by grammar,but to directly extract some prefabricated lexical chunks from mind.It can be said that lexical chunks are the key to making language output more convenient,fast and fluent.Lexical Chunk Approach regards lexical chunks as the basic unit of language teaching.Lexical chunks are mostly language units generated according to certain grammatical rules,which do not require conscious attention to the grammatical structure.So it can shorten the time from understanding to producing the language information,and thus greatly improve the correctness and fluency of language use.Therefore,it has attracted more and more attention from domestic and foreign scholars.However,in the process of consulting relevant research materials,this thesis finds that previous researches on Lexical Chunk Approach mainly focus on college English and English teaching in higher vocational colleges,while there are relatively few researches on lexical teaching in high schools.In addition,many studies focus on the improvement of students’ learning interest and academic performance,but neglect students’ specific mastery of lexical chunks.This thesis explores the theoretical and practical value of Lexical Chunk Approach in high school English vocabulary teaching.The research puts forward the following three questions:1.Which type of lexical chunks do students grasp better after applying Lexical Chunk Approach?2.What are the effects of Lexical Chunk Approach on students’ memory and use of English vocabulary?3.How can lexical Chunk Approach be effectively applied to vocabulary teaching in senior high schools?In order to prove the effectiveness and feasibility of Lexical Chunk Approach in English vocabulary teaching of senior high school,this thesis adopts experimentation,questionnaire method and literature analysis method to conduct this empirical research.This research treats 150 students who are from two parallel classes in Grade 1 of Chunlai Senior High School,in Yucheng county,Henan province as experimental subjects,and Class 5(75 students)is regarded as experimental class(EC),adopting Lexical Chunk Approach in English vocabulary teaching lectures.Class 6(75 students)is treated as control class(CC),adopting the traditional teaching procedure.At the end of the experiment,a post-test is conducted in EC and CC in order to verify the effectiveness of Lexical Chunk Approach.All the experimental data are collected and analyzed by SPSS 20.0 software.Through four-month teaching practice,the results of the research show that: In learning activities,students have a better grasp of poly-words,high-frequency collocation words and sentence frames and heads.After applying Lexical Chunk Approach,students’ vocabulary memory efficiency gets improved,and students can use vocabulary more flexibly and accurately.In future English vocabulary teaching,teachers should pay attention to the practice of lexical chunks,the analysis of lexical chunk functions and the improvement of students’ proficiency in lexical chunk classification.In addition,teachers should strengthen the study of Lexical Chunk Theory.More importantly,teachers should explore the idea of combining Lexical Chunk Approach with other teaching methods to make them better applied to teaching practice.