Vocabulary Teaching Through Lexical Phrase Approach

Vocabulary plays a very important role in language study. Without vocabulary, there would be no sentence, no text and no language. Britain's D.A. Wilkins (1978:56) says, "Without grammar, very little can be conveyed. Without vocabulary, nothing can be conveyed." Therefore, in order to master a language well, it is necessary for language learners to learn vocabulary well. But in fact, it seems very difficult for most of them to do the job well. They are always troubled in the memorization, comprehension and usage of words in their vocabulary learning and acquisition.Through a questionnaire and a sampled examination, the author finds that the traditional way still dominates vocabulary teaching and learning in China. But the traditional way does have some disadvantages. Quite a number of students have some difficulty in comprehending some certain words. On the other hand, sometimes although students can understand a word, yet they can't use the word freely and correctly,In order to solve the problem, an effective teaching approach is needed.Based on Lewis' Lexical Approach, the author adopts the lexical phrase approach, with the belief that teaching vocabulary through the lexical phrase can make students use the words freely and correctly and improve their ability of vocabulary production. The lexical phrase regards a lexical phrase as a pre-fabricated chunk, i.e. a string of words stored together in the mind as a single item that you retrieve and use either exactly as it stands or with minimal adaptation.In order to testify the feasibility of the lexical phrase approach, a comparative...