| Reading is one of the most important skills in second language learning. As one of the leading goals of foreign language teaching is to cultivate the students' reading ability, teachers, linguistics and educators involved in second language learning have pursued researches into reading teaching from different aspects, and made great contribution to reading teaching.One of the difficult points in students' reading is their failure to comprehend the lexical chunks in the text. However, the lexical chunk is not to be taken as the equivalent for the traditional concept of vocabulary, for it is a combined working of textual function and textual meaning. To effectively comprehend a text, a student needs to master the more or less fixed lexical chunks within that text. In other words, the key to effective comprehension lies not in isolated words and sentences, but in the student's ability to identify and combine those pre-structures of language and to produce desirable comprehension output. Based on a general description of the present reading teaching models, This paper argues that the traditional teaching approach in reading should be improved, for it is too "teacher-centered" to be of benefits for the students' long-term effective reading. Therefore, It examines the problem of inefficient reading comprehension from the insights of recent research on the lexical chunks. A general survey of related research suggests further the necessity for the introduction of lexical approaches to English reading comprehension classroom and improve reading comprehension by this theoretical knowledge. In order to test the feasibility of lexical approaches, the author has designed an experiment which was lasted for one term .The marked differences of the means between the experimental class and control class in the two tests indicate that the effectiveness of lexical approaches in reading is significant. Hence, the lexical chunks can help students improve their reading ability.
|
PDF Full Text Request