| English as Second Language Teaching (hereafter ESLT) has been for a long time in China. However, the teaching and learning result has not been satisfactory all the time. The main reason for it is that ESLT either over-emphasized grammar so that students were poor in communication, or over-emphasized the application of words in communication so that students who were not sensitive to language were poor in grammar, which resulted in their difficulty in commanding English. Just as Widdowson (1989, p.131) indicates that "the structural approach accounts for one aspect of competence by concentrating on analysis but does so at the expense of access, whereas the communicative approach concentrates on access to the relative neglect of analysis." However, the lexical approach put forward by Lewis in 1993 emphasizes the importance of lexical chunks in which vocabulary and grammar are involved, which seems to make a compromise for those who are insensitive to language.The lexical approach has arrested many scholars and researchers'attention since the early 1990s when Michael Lewis developed it in Great Britain, the key principle of which is that "language consists of grammaticalised lexis, not lexicalized grammar." And the teaching theory is that lexical chunks rather than sentences are the basic units of language teaching and learning. Just as Lewis suggested, the whole teaching process must be catered on raising students'awareness of lexical chunks and then improving their ability to chunk words with the method "observe-hypothesize-experiment". Accordingly, there is no doubt that mastering more lexical chunks can help students improve their ability of vocabulary production. Moreover, lexical chunks also involve grammar. Therefore, mastering more lexical chunks can lead to students' grammatical acquisition by analyzing and segmenting these chunks. As a result, students' English competence can be improved with the lexical approach.Writing this paper, I referred to the books The Lexical Approach, Implementing the Lexical Approach and Lexical Phrases, Language Teaching and so on, as well as the achievements of many other researchers. In this paper, I applied the lexical approach to vocabulary teaching and set up a rather systematical and reasonable teaching process according to my eight years' teaching experience, aiming at presenting the lexical approach and researching on the effectiveness of its application to vocabulary instruction.This paper is made up of five chapters. At the beginning of the thesis, the reason for writing the thesis is presented and the outline of the thesis is drawn. In chapter one, the main teaching methods and their corresponding vocabulary teaching methods in English as Foreign Language are presented and comments on its corresponding vocabulary instruction are made. Then some important aspects of the lexical approach are presented. Lastly, an overview is given on researches on the main concept of the lexical approach—lexical chunks at home and abroad. In chapter two, the foundations of the lexical approach including present situations and theoretical bases are laid. In chapter three, the experiment which includes hypotheses, subjects, instruments, teaching procedures and data analyses is described. In order to verify the three hypotheses that the application of the lexical approach can draw students'interest in English, enhance their learning independence and improve their English competence, two classes were chosen at random as the Controlled Class and the Experimental Class in which there were 83 students in total and the experiment was carried out which lasted one semester. The subjects of the experiment were freshmen in the second term and the lexical approach was applied to the Experimental Class while a traditional way was adopted to teach the Controlled Class. After the experiment, the data of the questionnaires and the tests before and after the experiment were collected. In chapter four, EXCELL and SPSS 15.0 were used to analyze the collected data of the questionnaires and the tests before and after the experiment and the findings lent much support to my hypotheses. In chapter five, the major findings of the research were summed up and its limitations and pedagogical implications in the thesis were pointed out, in the hope that it can be of great help to effective English teaching in vocational schools. |
