On The Application Of Lexical Chunk Approach To Vocational School English Reading Teaching

Lexical chunks are the unity of grammatical rules, semantic meanings and pragmatic contexts. It broke the traditional meaning of vocabulary, thus is advantageous to the development of text comprehension ability, and the promotion of the language acquisition and language output. Based on J. Nattinger and J. DeCarrico's theory (1992), this thesis intends to study whether the application of lexical chunk approach in English reading teaching could effectively improve the English learners'reading proficiency.English learning has been a big problem for Chinese students, and the exploration of methods or strategies improving the efficiency of English reading has always been a hot topic. By reviewing the related literature of lexical chunks, the author has got some hints that lexical chunk approach might be a good way to improve English reading acquisition. After an experiment with the length of one semester, the students in the experimental class have greatly improved their reading proficiency and speed, which proves that lexical chunks can effectively help students improve their abilities of reading. The experiment verifies the feasibility of lexical chunk approach in vocational school English teaching. It can help the students improve their comprehensive ability of reading. Although some limitations still exist in this study, such as the short period and only a relative small number of participants, it has yielded some useful findings which are believed to have great implications for future foreign language learning and teaching.The author selected two parallel classes of the Accounting Department in Jinan Vocational College as the subjects and conducted an experiment from March to June in 2010, a total of 16 weeks'teaching time. One class was randomly selected as the experimental class, and the other as the control class. The experimental class received special instructions of lexical chunk approach, while the control class still followed the traditional grammar-based method. The author employed the SPSS data analysis study to analyze the results of the experiment and got the conclusion that the reading proficiency and reading speed of the experimental group of students improved much more than that of control group. Experimental results show that the application of lexical chunk approach is effective on vocational school reading teaching and it can help students improve their comprehension ability including the reading proficiency and speed. In the last chapter, the author combines her own work on English teaching with lexical chunk approach and suggests that teachers in vocational schools should also well realize the importance of the lexical chunks to the promotion of teaching effect and actively guide students to improve their English study.The effects of lexical chunk approach on EFL teaching of writing, listening and speaking have been proved by domestic and international studies, while research on effects of lexical chunks on reading teaching is still inadequate. A major finding that this research reveals is that lexical chunk approach can improve students'reading proficiency and speed, which provides new ideas for the vocational reading teaching. The author hopes this thesis can provide a useful reference for further researches in this area. What's more, this empirical experiment studies the improvement of students'reading proficiency and at the same time study the improvement of students'reading speed.