Feasibility Of The Lexical Chunk Approach On Students' Oral English Development

Linguistic research has found lexical chunks,such as idioms,collocations,and institutionalized expressions,etc.are of great importance in language and language use for a long time.But in the past lexical chunks were considered as a marginal phenomenon in foreign language,and not much attention was paid to lexical chunks in language learning and teaching,except a small number of them called fixed phrases.A large number of fixed,semi-fixed lexical chunks have been greatly neglected, especially those with certain pragmatic functions.However,in recent years,with the development of corpus-linguistics,lexical chunks again become the center of the research in corpus linguistics, psycholinguistics and other linguistics for their prevalence in foreign language.People begin to rethink the nature of language and language acquisition.Language is not only a ruled-based analytical system, but also a memory-based formulaic system.The traditionally grammatical view of language is greatly challenged by lexical view of language.Lewis(1993) points out that language is not a system of lexicalized grammar,but a system of grammaticalized lexis.Language consists not only of traditional grammar and vocabulary but often of multi-word prefabricated chunks.Following the lexical view of language,linguists like Michael Lewis propose a new teaching approach:Lexical Approach.In the lexical approach,lexis in its various types is thought to play a central role in language teaching and learning.Lexical Approach has theoretically summarized that focus on lexical chunks in language teaching and learning is effective for learners' language development,and provides some practical teaching methods including teaching principles,teaching techniques,activity designs,etc.But it needs empirical studies to show its true value in the teaching practice. The present empirical study was designed to test whether Lexical Approach can facilitate the students' oral English development.Two parallel groups of 60 first-year doctors participated in the study, which lasted for one semester.The teaching methodology in the experiment group was based on Lexical Approach,with some modification.The experiment lasted for one semester,four months.The oral tests were conducted before and after the experiment to test the effect of the teaching experiment,and the subjects' individual presentations;and group discussions in the experiment were recorded for further analysis.The data obtained from the test score was analyzed by using the SPSS13.0 for Windows.And the data from the questionnaire were analyzed and discussed as well.The results show that compared with the control group,the experiment group did a better job in the posttest,spoke more accurately,and showed more improvement in the individual presentation.The present study confirms the effectiveness of Lexical Approach in the learners' oral English development. It is hopeful that this thesis would offer some implications for the application of lexical approach in language learning and teaching,and explore a more effective way in language teaching.