| Because there exist shortcomings for approaches overemphasizing structure and communication, applied linguists try to find a compromise between these two approaches. The Lexical approach came into being under this background. In 1997, Michael Lewis published his book The Lexical Approach and became the typical representative for this revolutionary approach. In this book, he discarded the traditional view of language and tried to look at language and language teaching from a totally new angle. In his opinion, language is grammaticalized lexis rather than lexicalized grammar. In particular, the lexis here refers to the concept "lexical chunks", which comprises the core of Lexical Approach. Lewis stated that lexical chunks are rather fixed language forms that appear frequently in real communication. They are widely used by most language users within that speech community. According to his understanding, the continuous and coherent language used by most native language users result from the combination of these frequently used and meaningful chunks. This point has also been verified by scientific statistics. After a research into linguistic corpus, Altenbergt claimed that up to 80% of language used by adult native speakers is constructed from lexical chunks.(Altenbergt, 1998) In order to achieve a good effect for language teaching, teaching itself should also respect this feature of language. Therefore, lexical chunks are treated as the basis for language teaching and learning in Lexical Approach.The core idea of the Lexical Approach is to regard lexical chunks as the basic units for language teaching and learning. This could be attributed to the following considerations. To begin with, lexical chunks are treated as an unanalyzed whole in cognition and memory. In real communication, they are retrieved as a whole as well. In this case, learners do not have to construct sentences by applying rules plus words, but mostly construct sentences with the help of the learned chunks. This characteristic helps reduce their processing burden, while at the same time more attention can be given to the overall structure of their idea. These two points work together to help improve the fluency of their expressions. Secondly, in applying the Lexical Approach, through awareness-raising of lexical chunks, learners will habitually begin to treat lexical chunks as their learning materials. The acquired chunks, as a whole, will be applied directly during production or applied after variation. This feature of the Lexical Approach guarantees that the production by learners could be close to that of native speakers to the maximum degree; hence the possibility of idiomaticity and accuracy. Lastly, regarding grammar instruction, the Lexical Approach does not totally neglect grammar. As Lewis ever wrote, the Lexical Approach is not simply a shift from grammar to lexis. On the contrary, it proposes to integrate lexical chunks with grammar rules. More specifically, after their analysis of lexical chunks, learners make hypotheses on language rules involved, which may be verified or disapproved in other cases. Then, a new hypothesis is formed and evaluation is conducted again. The procedure of "Observe-Hypothesis-Experiment" lasts constantly until the rule in question is acquired.To test the feasibility of the Lexical Approach in college English teaching, two classes of non-English majors from students Central China Normal University are chosen as subjects. They are randomly divided into experiment group and control group so that a quasi-experiment is carried out. On the precondition that the two groups share similar English proficiency before the experiment, the Lexical Approach is applied to the experiment group for one semester. Taking learners' written production as a testing point, the experimenter collects testing data and analyzes it with the help of SPSS 13.0. As a result, the post-test score is higher than pre-test for both groups, but the experiment group enjoys a higher increase. In order to figure out whether the greater progress is caused by the application of the Lexical Approach, the experimenter makes calculation on the lexical chunks used by both of these groups. It is found that the experiment group uses much more chunks than the control group, so their production is more fluent and idiomatic; hence their higher score. All possible variables being controlled to the greatest degree, it is concluded that the Lexical Approach is valid in English teaching and learning for college non-English majors. From the experiment, some implications are inferred: firstly, teaching and learning English through Lexical Chunks helps enhance teaching and learning effect; secondly, teaching techniques even typical of other approaches could be adopted for serving the Lexical Approach; thirdly, grammar is not totally discarded in the Lexical Approach. Therefore, it is necessary to balance grammar teaching with the Lexical Approach in the case of Chinese college English teaching.
|
PDF Full Text Request