Teaching English Majors In China With Verb-centered Lexical-Grammatical Teaching

At present, the separation of lexis from grammar is a feature of China's TEFL and EFL learning, which has caused serious consequences. However, combining lexis and grammar is a new implication of corpus linguistic researches and the correspondent teaching of chunks and patterns offers a promising new direction for English teaching. There've been numerous theoretical studies and teaching experiments on chunk. But researches on pattern are mostly theoretical discussions and there are very few empirical studies.Meanwhile, verbs have long been emphasized in grammar while their role in lexis has not been studied systematically. And their role in combining lexis and grammar has not been discussed so far.Focusing on these two points, the researcher does a research on the following aspects:First, the researcher reviews the present separate teaching and learning of lexis from grammar in China, and reviews the studies at home and abroad on the combination of lexis and grammar. So it is proved that lexis and grammar in China's TEFL and EFL learning should be combined and can be combined by teaching chunks and patterns. Besides, the researcher proves that verbs play a special role in both lexis and grammar: verbs collocate with most parts of speech and take a central position in traditional grammar. However, learning verbs has always been difficult for Chinese learners in terms of multi-word verbs, the different usages between Chinese and English verbs, etc. A corpus research reveals verbal errors make up fifteen percent of all errors Chinese learners make and syntactical errors which are closely related to verbs make up sixteen percent. In addition, Contrastive interlanguage analyses (CIA) show that some verb chunks used by Chinese learners are not typical or even wrong and some patterns are used in a wrong way to express a certain meaning.Based on these two theoretical foundations, the researcher proposes Verb-centered Lexical-Grammatical Teaching (VLGT). It combines lexis and grammar by teaching chunks and patterns, takes verbs as the center of combining lexis and grammar, and emphasizes teaching verb chunks and verb patterns. The criteria of choosing which chunks and patterns to teach are learners' needs, frequency, semantic predictability, strength and leamability. A series of new teaching procedures and activities are also put forward. They inspire learners to observe and analyze language, to think independently and to draw their own conclusions, and serve as instructions for their self-study.The effectiveness of VLGT is checked by an empirical study. An experiment is conducted in the comprehensive English course for third-year English Majors Upgrading from Professional Training to University (EMU) in Huazhong Normal University. It lasts for a semester. Two intact classes are assigned into Experiment Group (EG) and Control Group (CG) randomly. The EG receives VLGT while the CG receives traditional way of teaching. VLGT is realized by (1) conducting Consciousness-Raising (C-R) activities which emphasize chunks and patterns; (2) teaching typical verb chunks and verb patterns; (3) teaching lexis in verb chunks and verb patterns; (4) analyzing the grammatical functions of main verb chunks and patterns to understand a sentence. The main hypothesis of this research is that VLGT improves learners' language competence. Based on this hypothesis, three sub-hypotheses are put forward:(1) VLGT contributes to learners' writing in terms of idiomaticity, which will be shown by the chunk percentage of learners' writing.(2) VLGT improves learners' writing ability, which will be shown by the scores they get for their writing.(3) VLGT enhances learners' confidence in learning English and improves their methods of learning lexis, which will be shown by the results of "Questionnaire about English Learning Situation".The data of the research is obtained through a writing test and a questionnaire survey. It is typed into SPSS15.0 and processed. Both descriptive statistical tests and inferential statistics tests are conducted. The results show that VLGT improves EMU's English writing in idiomaticity, greatly promotes their writing ability and enhances their confidence in English learning. Only learners' methods of learning lexis have not been improved. This may be caused by several reasons: (1) EMU's level of English proficiency is low and greatly heterogeneous; (2) it's difficult for EMU, a group of adult learners, to overcome the ingrained ideas on language learning or to change their old learning baits; (3) some tasks of VLGT are too demanding or over-loaded with lexis.