A Study Of The Lexical Approach In Children's Foreign Language Acquisition

Language has traditionally been taken as a system of lexical grammar, which has dominated the language teaching for a long time. However, recently, this view is being challenged by some linguists and applied linguists, like, Michael Lewis, James Nattinger, etc. They think that language is not a system of lexical grammar, but a system of grammatical lexis. Then, what's the most impoitant is not grammar, but fonmitlaic expressions (grammatical lexis), which pervade in language.Consequently, the above new view gets rise to a new language teaching approach Lexical Approach, which emphasizes the teaching of formulaic expressions, ignoresthe grammatical analysis and holds the view that the development of listening ability is prior to that of speaking ability. In the thesis, this approach is adjusted to Chinese children's English teaching and taken as a bridge between language learning and language acquisition. In other words, it is applied to create a kind of acquisitional atmosphere in a foreign-language-learning situation. After the seven-month Chinese children's (Grade 4 and Grade 5) English teaching experiment with two tests, this research tries to prove that the Lexical Approach of this thesis is fit for Chinese children. It is hopeful that this thesis would contribute a lot to Chinese English teaching and further applied linguistic research.