A Study Of Applying Lexical Chunks To English Vocabulary Teaching In Senior High Schools

As one of the three elements of language,vocabulary is the essential cornerstone of language.Therefore,vocabulary teaching is of great importance in English language teaching.Under the guidance of traditional teaching method,most English teachers focus on isolated words,only teaching the pronunciation,spelling and meaning of a single word,and the students just passively accept what they are taught and memorize the words mechanically without knowing the usage of the words in real context,which will of course result in a variety of problems,such as low efficiency of learning and a lack of study initiative.However,the theory of lexical chunks provides a new approach for vocabulary teaching.` At present many scholars have studied Lexical Approach,but the subjects are mostly university students.So I planned to apply the chunk theory to vocabulary teaching in senior high school to find out the effect of Lexical Approach on senior high school students’ acquisition of vocabulary.The thesis researches the following questions.1.What effect does chunk-based Lexical Approach have on students’ efficiency of memorizing words and application of the English words?2.What’s the students’ attitude towards the application of Lexical Approach?The experiment takes the students of two classes from Changjun Xiangfu High School in Changsha Hunan Province as the subjects.Class 1706 with 51 students is the experimental class and Class 1709 with 49 students the control class.The experiment lasted one semester(the second semester in Senior Two).During the experiment,the Lexical Approach was applied to the experimental class,while in the control class I taught with conventional vocabulary teaching method.Students of both classes were given a pretest in vocabulary and writing at the beginning of the experiment and we also had a face-to-face interview.At the end of the experiment students had a post-test in vocabulary and writing and another face-to-face interview.Then all the data is analyzed by using SPSS.The results shows that compared with those in the control class,the students in the experimental class have improved significantly both in vocabulary and writing ability.By face-to-face interviews,we also know that before the experiment students have much difficulty in memorizing words,while after the experiment their efficiency of memorizing words has improved a lot.Therefore,they think lexical approach is practical and effective.It is concluded that conventional vocabulary teaching hasmany drawbacks with low efficiency of learning and may effect students’ learning positiveness,while the chunk-based Lexical Approach is of much help in improving students’ acquisition of vocabulary and enhancing the accuracy,authenticity and fluency of students’ language output.Lexical Approach,which is helpful to improve their learning efficiency,can effectively stimulate students’ enthusiasm and initiative and is favored by most of the students.What we can learn from the study is that we senior high school teachers should research more to improve our teaching method and apply advanced and practical teaching theory to English teaching,which will promote students’ interest and enthusiasm and thus improve the learning efficiency.