The Application Of Lexical Chunk Approach In Senior High School English Vocabulary Teaching

English vocabulary teaching plays an important role as an organic part of English teaching.However,traditional English teaching,especially in high school,mainly takes grammar,structure and function as teaching content.Teachers tend not to attach importance to vocabulary teaching while students memorize words through mechanical repetitions without knowing how to use the words in specific contexts.Michael Lewis(1993)put forward the concept of lexical chunk,a kind of language construction with both formal and functional nature,and a combination of grammar,semantics and context,which is proved to be able to promote English vocabulary learning and application.This study applies the lexical chunk approach to high school English vocabulary teaching in order to further prove whether lexical chunk approach is helpful to English vocabulary teaching and learning in senior high school and test its effect on vocabulary application ability and vocabulary memory ability respectively.Based on the lexical chunk approach proposed by Michael Lewis,this study makes an attempt to answer the following two research questions by using experimental research and interview:(1)Can lexical chunk approach improve the vocabulary achievements of students in senior high school obviously?(2)Can lexical chunk approach affect students’ vocabulary memory ability and vocabulary application ability obviously? And which ability does lexical chunk approach affect more? In this study,two parallel classes of senior two in the Fourth Division No.1middle school are taken as the research subject.In the experimental class,lexical chunk approach is used for vocabulary teaching,while in the control class,the conventional teaching method is used for vocabulary teaching.After the experiment,the author uses SPSS 20 to analyze the experimental results and discuss the research questions.The major findings are as follows:(1)lexical chunk approach can improve high school students’ English vocabulary performance.According to the results of the experiment,the vocabulary scores of the two classes are improved,but the vocabulary scores of the experimental class are significantly higher than those of the control class(P = 0 < 0.05),and the post-test scores of theexperimental class are also significantly higher than the pretest scores(P = 0<0.05),(2)lexical chunk approach also can promote students’ English vocabulary memory ability and application ability.Through the lexical chunk approach,the post-test scores of both vocabulary memory question items and application question items of the experiment class are significantly higher than the pretest scores respectively(P=0),and through the comparison,it is found that lexical chunk approach is more effective in improving students’ vocabulary application ability.Based on the findings,the author puts forward the following implications:(1)teachers should plan and purposefully apply lexical chunk approach to daily vocabulary teaching;(2)teachers should cultivate students’ chunk awareness and improve students’ ability to extract and use chunks;(3)when organizing students to practice chunks to consolidate vocabulary,teachers should use different classroom activities,such as using chunks to retell stories or translate sentences,so as to provide opportunities for students to use chunks as much as possible.