Application Of Lexical Chunks In Senior High School English Teaching

Vocabulary is an essential part of a language and plays an important part in language teaching and learning. However, in China's senior high school, vocabulary teaching has not been duly emphasized. On the contrary, grammar has been the focus of language teaching and learning and has dominated language teaching for a long time. With the requirement of the increased vocabulary size based on the New Senior English Curriculum Criterion (2003), vocabulary learning usually considered to be a time-consuming but ineffective process becomes an urgent problem to be solved. Thus it is necessary for both teachers and students to find an effective and efficient way for vocabulary teaching and learning.In recent years, research interest on the multiword prefabricated chunks has been on the increase. The development of language corpus reveals that there exist a large number of lexical chunks in human language. In 1993, Michael Lewis published his book The Lexical Approach, in which he argues that "language consists of grammaticalized lexis, not lexicalized grammar." This view of language provides a new angle for language teaching and learning. He also comes up with a new approach for language teaching-the Lexical Approach. In his Lexical Approach, lexical chunks are seen as the basic units for language teaching and learning.In China, however, most of the researches concerning the Lexical Approach have not gone beyond the level of theoretical discussion. Although some are concerned with the application of the Lexical Approach to English class, few touch upon the feasibility of implementing the Lexical Approach in senior high school.The aim of the present study is to explore the feasibility and effectiveness of the implementation of the Lexical Approach into the English teaching in senior high school. The research-related experiment in the form of investigation and class observation was carried out in Minquan senior high school in Henan Province. Two classes of students from Seniorâ…¡were chosen as the subjects of the experiment. Class one under the author's class instruction was assigned as the experimental group while Class two taught by the author's colleague was the control group. Before the experiment, both classes took examinations as a way to measure their overall language competence and lexical chunk competence. The results showed that there was no significant difference between students in both groups. Then the author implemented the Lexical Approach to the experimental group while the control group followed the traditional teaching method. In the final examination, the experimental group outperformed the control group, which showed that the implementation of the Lexical Approach into English classes in senior high school is feasible and effective.