The Application Of Prefabricated Chunks To Reading Instruction In Senior High School

Nowadays reading as the primary means of access to information has been valued by many people, at the same time English curriculum standards in high school thinks students reading ability as an important part of English instruction. However, at present, there still exist many problems in students reading comprehension; for example, many students focus too much attention on the so-called language points and grammar. It is the following reasons that cause these problems:the first is traditional text analysis method; the second is due to the students' lack of reading strategy.In recent years, more attention has given to the Prefabricated Chunks Approach in the field of linguistics. Michael Lewis based on the literature about the actual language use, points out that prefabricated chunks are the focus of language use, and therefore, they should also become the focus of language teaching. Prefabricated chunks have the advantages of grammar, semantics and context and they also have a more fixed grammatical structure, stable collocation and specific pragmatic environment. So they speed up language processing and are of great significance in the promotion of language acquisition and language fluency. Prefabricated chunks have an important function of information organization in the discourse, organizing discourse structure, connecting information and indicating context and so on, whose functions are very obvious in accelerating reading speed, better understanding and grasping discourse structure. Therefore, prefabricated chunks theory provides a feasible thinking way for many students in senior high school.At the guidance of the theory of prefabricated chunks, the present research intends to investigate the feasibility and validity of chunks study in high school English instruction. First, the author conducts a theoretical study and then using well-designed experiments to verify it. The subjects are selected from two classes of Hanjing Senior high school of Pucheng County in Shaanxi Province. All the 116 subjects are in their second year,58 of which in class one as the experimental group, received chunks instruction; the other 58 students in class two are in the control group so they are taught in the traditional teaching method. The experiment lasts for 20 weeks. Meanwhile, the experimenter collects data through two questionnaires and two tests, using SPSS 10.0 as statistical software. The questionnaire results show that students have a positive views and attitudes towards prefabricated chunks instruction. After a semester's experiment, the reading achievements in the EC are significantly higher than that in CC. This result not only confirms that the effectiveness of prefabricated chunks in the promotion of high school English reading, but confirms this hypothesis. However, in this study, there are also some shortcomings, which need further improvement and development.