The Application Of Lexical Chunks To English Reading Instruction In Senior High School

In the process of English learning,reading is one of the indispensable ways of input and one of the four basic language skills.English reading plays a crucial role in English teaching and learning,thus more attention should be paid to English reading teaching.However,there are some difficulties faced by students during the process of reading,such as lack of vocabulary,inability in understanding the long sentences,time limits and inadequate reading strategies,etc.In recent decades,increasing attention has been paid to lexical chunks and applications of lexical chunks have been carried out in English teaching.Lexical chunks are regarded as the combinations of grammar,semantics and context.Language users can store and extract them as whole units.The application of lexical chunks has achieved a lot of good results in vocabulary and writing teaching,but the researches on applying lexical chunks to reading teaching are relatively insufficient.And among the cases of applying lexical chunks to reading teaching,there are few researches on investigating the influence of the teaching of lexical chunks on the students’ lexical chunk size and reading speed.Therefore,this research aims to utilize the advantages of lexical chunks to investigate the feasibility and effectiveness of lexical chunks in English reading teaching in senior high school.Based on that,three research questions are proposed in this research:1)Can the application of lexical chunks to reading instruction contribute to the enhancement of the students’ lexical chunk size?2)Is the application of lexical chunks to reading instruction beneficial for the students to accelerate their reading speed?3)Can the application of lexical chunks to reading instruction improve the students’ test results in the reading comprehension part?The author presents the theoretical basis of this research first and then designs and carries out the experiment to testify it.This research chooses two classes fromNo.2 Middle School Attached to Qinghai Normal University in senior 2 as the experimental class and the controlled class respectively to carry out a teaching experiment of 18 weeks.The author applies lexical chunks to reading instruction in the experimental class and only uses traditional teaching method to teach reading in the controlled class.The adopted research methods are testing,questionnaire and interview.The tests include tests of lexical chunks,tests of reading speed and the reading comprehension part in the final exams to get the students’ reading test results before and after the experiment.Finally,the software SPSS is used to deal with the results collected from the tests and the questionnaire.The results report that the reading test results of the experimental class are obviously higher than the controlled class.In addition,this research finds out that lexical chunks also have some positive impacts on enlarging the students’ lexical chunks and accelerating the students’ reading speed.As a result,it is proved that the application of lexical chunks to English reading teaching in high school is effective and feasible.The significance of this research is divided into theoretical and practical significance.Theoretically,this research complements the existed researches on the application of chunks to reading teaching.Practically,this study provides a new direction for high school English teachers to improve the students’ reading performance.