The Application Of Lexical Approach To Intermediate Chinese Reading Teaching

Reading is a foundation course in Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language(TCFL). Meanwhile, it is a course involving in Chinese language skills. After entering the intermediate-level study, overseas students will be confronted with a plenty of new words and reading assignments, therefore, it is rather necessary for them to master an effective reading skill to ensure the accomplishment of reading. In reading teaching, many teachers have adopted various teaching methods and students have spent lots of time in remembering new words and studying grammatical rules. However, the effect being achieved still cannot live up to their expectations. On considering such situation, this thesis attempts to apply the "lexical approach" to reading teaching for oversea students with an intermediate level, thus to confirm whether lexical approach can promote the students' reading competence.Since 1990s, under the general background that foreign language teaching should target at developing students' pragmatic competence, lexical approach springs up quietly. Based on the recognition and foundation of lexical chunks, lexical approach distinguishes itself from the traditional grammar-centered language teaching mode. It gathers the advantages of grammar-teaching theories and communicative- competence theories, demonstrates its superiority in language listening, speaking, reading and writingBy taking examples of both domestic and overseas research findings on lexical chunks and reading teaching, the writer attempts to apply lexical approach to reading teaching among the overseas students with intermediate level. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of lexical approach in reading teaching, a three months' long teaching experiment has been done among overseas students from two intact classes which are labeled as controlled class and experimental class. The experimental group will be taught with lexical approach, while the controlled group will be taught with the traditional teaching method. After the experiment, there was a questionnaire survey conducted among all the students involved. All the data recorded from the four tests and the questionnaire were typed into computer and analyzed with SPSS17.0.The analytical results proves that:1) Lexical approach can effectively improve the students reading competence. Through the comparison of the tests results in different periods, the performance of experimental class is far better than that of controlled class.2) Lexical approach can effectively stimulate students' interest to read, enhance their confidence in reading, and promote their motivation to read. Through the statistical analysis of the questionnaire, it is not difficult to see that the lexical chunks learning strategy acquired by the students in experimental class during the experiment has greatly stimulated their desire of self-study.