The Application Of Lexical Chunks Approach To Reading Teaching At College Level

It is generally acknowledged by the linguists and language educators that reading is an important way to get information in language learning and plays great part in students'four skills. Teachers have tried many ways to improve students'reading abilities and students work hard to develop their reading abilities by doing comprehension exercises.In English teaching process, lexical chunk approach is a language teaching theory, which not only emphasizes the grammar structure but also the practical application. More and more scholars are attracted by the effect of chunks in the English teaching process. Lexical chunks approach takes the English language as the combined stable chunks. The stability of the structure and semantics of the predictability of chunks can reduce the difficulty of language acquisition and use. In the process of teaching reading, teaching the word block as a whole chunk and guiding the students to shift their attention away from individual words to chunks can make students get a clear structure of the text, grasp the method of the writer, foster students'discourse awareness and improve their reading ability.The purpose of the paper is to find out the application of lexical chunks approach which is learned as an ensemble in reading discourse can improve students'English reading ability at college level. In order to determine the relationship between lexical chunks and reading discourse, The author borrowed the classification of James R. Nattinger and Jeanette S. Decarrico (1992), who classified lexical chunks into four groups in terms of structural criteria: polywords, phrasal constraints, sentence builders, text frames. The author collected the data from the subjects'scores and compared the use of lexical chunks in those reading comprehension papers by two remarkably different groups of college students. The author collected data from the exams that carried out on Experimental Class and Controlled Class and analyzed it by SPSS 17.0. The study has been carried out on sophomores majoring in accounting in Jinan Vocational College.According to the analysis of the results show that lexical chunks and reading discourse are closely related and that the two groups of subjects embody great differences in applying lexical chunks in reading. These findings suggest that lexical chunks play a major role in the English reading teaching. Researches of the use of lexical chunks are illustrated to indicate that lexical chunks are applicable and important in improving the students'reading comprehension ability in reading discourse. This study, which has some pedagogical implications, also raises issues for future studies.