An Empirical Research Of The Effect Of Lexical Chunks Approach On College Students’ Reading Comprehension

Since1990s, the research of vocabulary teaching has had theoretical and systematicdevelopment abroad, but at home it is still insufficient for systematic, deep-level researches.According to the current situation of college English vocabulary teaching, an approach ofvocabulary teaching for college English, i.e. lexical chunks approach, is proposed in thethesis based on Michael Lewis’s lexical approach, Nattinger and DeCarrico’s lexicalchunks research. Lexical chunks approach provides the students studying English as aSecond Language (ESL) with chunks of various length, better vocabulary learning methodsand a new idea for their reading comprehension, that is, the reform of drawback resultedfrom traditional teaching methods which takes the single word as grammatical unit. Theresearch tries to explore a new road to English reading comprehension for college studentsthrough the bridge of “lexical chunks approach” between “input” and “output” of readingcontents. Besides, in the process of language teaching, students’ reading attitude and theability of autonomous learning change greatly.In order to prove the practicality of the research,104non-English majors of LuoyangInstitute of Science and Technology have been chosen. The experiment of applying lexicalchunks to college students’ reading has been carried out in two parallel classes which arethe experimental class (Mechanical Engineering Class) and controlled class (MaterialsScience and Engineering Class). The lexical chunks approach is used to guide the readingof the experimental class, while the traditional approach is adopted for the controlled class.The students of the two classes have identical studying background and taught by the sameteacher. Besides, the teaching materials are the same.The experiment testifies that lexical chunks approach applied to the college students’reading is effective and can help students accumulate vocabulary faster and better and canimprove students’ reading comprehension step by step. There might be some deficiencies in this research and the experiment willcontinue to be deepened in the future.