The Application Of Lexical Chunks To English Newspaper Reading In Rural Senior Middle Schools

English reading is one of the quickest and most convenient ways of getting information in a society geared to the increasing tendency of globalization. As is specified in the new English Curriculum Criterion for senior high schools, reading ability is one of the most important skills and teachers are required to pay special attention to improve students'reading ability. Therefore, more and more importance is attached to the training of reading comprehension. However, despite the fact that both teachers and students have made great efforts, the result is still unsatisfactory. Language researchers and teachers alike are plagued by the discrepancy between the time spent and the efficiency achieved in reading teaching. Worse still, the defects of existing textbooks, whose improper design of vocabulary build-up and lack of information updating contribute directly to difficulties in arousing students' interests in reading. Drawing from the insights of research on lexical approach and using 21st Century Teens Senior 3 Edition as the main reading training materials, this thesis seeks to explore a lexical-approach induced mode of reading approach aiming at improving senior English reading.Lexical approach (also known as chunking approach), as a new teaching and learning approach, has arrested the attention of many experts and scholars in the past ten years. As a kind of compromise between structural approach and communicative approach, the lexical approach broadens our research horizons and gives us a better idea of foreign language teaching. The aim of this thesis is to explore the feasibility and effectiveness of applying this approach to teaching English reading through empirical methods.In order to test the feasibility and effectiveness of lexical approach, this thesis starts with a relevant literature review, analyzing the current reading comprehension problems existing in senior high schools in China as it comments and outlines idea and advantages of chunking approach. It then introduces an experiment conducted in Senior Three in Shifang Middle School of Wuping in Longyan for 16 weeks. Two classes of Senior Three were assigned respectively to experimental and controlled conditions. The experimental class received guidelines of lexical-chunk approach, while the controlled class followed the traditional way of teaching. Pre-test and pro-test were conducted among the students in the EC and in the CC. All the collected aata from the tests was processed with the SPSS 10.0. The significant differences of the means between the pre-test and post-test indicate that the lexical approach is very effective in English reading in senior high school. The thesis finally concludes that lexical approach is practicable and its application is meaningful to English teaching in senior high school.