An Empirical Study On The Correlation Between Lexical Chunks And Senior High School Students' CE Translation Ability

With the Criterion of the New English Curriculum issued, it is more and more important to cultivate the students' translation ability in senior high schools. Teachers have tried out many different teaching approaches to improve students' translation ability and at the same time, students also endeavor to improve their translation ability by doing mountains of exercises, however, it turns out that most of the students are still weak at translation. This thesis is a tentative probe into the teaching of translation by introducing lexical approach and discussing its effect on EFL translation.Lexical chunks are sets of language parts which appear in a high frequency in natural language. Normally, the lexical chunks are phrases or some syntactic structures on the sentence level and are characterized by a high degree of fixed structure and meaning. The lexical chunks are stored in the human brain in forms of the whole, and can help turn the complex syntactic analysis into relatively simple chunk processing, greatly facilitate language processing and use and ease the pressure of real time language production. The language user can make adjustments to the balance point between these two systems according to specific communicative goals.Lexical approach, a new language teaching theory, is proposed under the background that foreign language teaching should aim at develop students' pragmatic competence. Avoiding the shortcomings of relying too heavy on either theories of grammar on one hand, or theories of communicative competence on the other, the lexical approach shows its unique advantages in language teaching in term of listening, speaking or writing. Therefore, the lexical approach to second language teaching has received great interest as an alternative to grammar-based approaches. Lots of linguists have done much research on it. It is shown that lexical approach is of significant use for English learners and EFL teaching.This thesis seeks to investigate the effect of lexical chunks on EFL translation. Two intact classes of students in Senior Two in Yantai No.4 High School were assigned to experimental and control conditions.60 students in the experimental class received guidelines of lexical approach, while 59 students in the control class followed the traditional way of teaching. The experiment lasted for eight weeks. Tests and a questionnaire survey were conducted among the students in the EC and in the CC. All the data collected from the tests and the survey was entered into computer and processed with the SPSS 10.0. The analysis reveals that the average translation ability of the students in the EC is better than that of the students in the CC. From the findings we know the students with the knowledge of lexical chunks can get better performance in English translation and improve their English proficiency as well. The lexical approach is very effective in English translation in senior high schools.