An Empirical Study Of Lexical Chunks Instruction And Improvement Of Students’ English Reading Proficiency

"Where there is little reading there will be little language learning." Reading and languagelearning are interdependent, without reading，nothing can be done in the development ofcompetence in listening, speaking and writing. Reading is of great importance for collegestudents. However, after years of English learning, many Chinese college students still havesome difficulties in reading comprehension though they have spent much time and energy on it.Language traditionally used to be thought as two independent systems: vocabulary andgrammar. This concept has deeply rooted in the context of English teaching in China. However,in recent years, the lexical chunks approach which was put forward by Lewis in1993, hasreceived great interests in second language teaching as an alternative to grammar-basedapproach. The core principle of lexical chunks approach is that language consists ofgrammaticalized lexis rather than lexicalized grammar. As a composite of language form andfunction, lexical chunk indicates the positive interaction of semantics, syntax and pragmatics,and promotes the development of language utterances; it breaks through the traditional sense ofthe word and collocation, whose scope has been expanded to sentence or even discourse, whichare conducive to discourse comprehension abilities (Lewis,1993). Lexical chunks can reducethe burden of language processing, speed up the language acquisition and facilitate languageoutput. The wide existence and importance of these lexical units in the language teaching havebeen noticed and discussed by a number of linguists in China and abroad. Though the recentyears have witnessed the great development of researches into lexical chunks, the number ofresearches into lexical chunks approach and English reading is still limited at home and theresearches with respect to effects of lexical chunk instruction on different types of readingactivities have not been found yet.For Chinese students, the improvement of reading ability is the basis for the cultivation oftheir English comprehensive competence. Nearly all non-English majors are required to takeCET4, in which many of them find Reading Comprehension quite difficult. Thus, to meet therequirements of College English Curriculum and the current great requirement for readingcomprehension in our country, the paper, based on the theoretical foundation of lexical chunks, aims to answer the following research questions:(1) Does the lexical chunks instruction enhance the English reading proficiency of collegestudents?(2) To what extent does the lexical chunks approach affect the different types of reading:extensive reading (skimming) and intensive reading (cloze and general RC) andcorrespondingly what are effective ways of teaching or teaching techniques concerning itsapplication to different cases?The empirical research was conducted among96sophomores from two different classesmajoring in pharmacy and clinical medicine in Shanxi Medical University. Two tests and twoquestionnaires were involved in the research. The lexical chunks approach was applied to theexperimental class, while the traditional teaching in the control class.The results obtained show that the total reading scores and even the score on each type ofreading activity in the experimental class are conspicuously higher than that of the control class,which proves that the lexical approach is effective in improving the students’ readingproficiency. To be specific, among the three types of reading activities, the improvement in thebanked cloze which is considered by majority of subjects as the most difficult reading exercisehas turned out to be the greatest of all, while the improvement in general readingcomprehension and skimming follows respectively as the second and third place. Furthermore,through data analysis based on the questionnaires after the lexical chunks approach has beenintroduced in English classroom, most of subjects in the experimental class are positive aboutthe approach in reading and the change of their learning attitudes before and after is apparent,too. Therefore, it can be concluded that the lexical chunk approach is a teachable and effectiveapproach in improving students’ reading ability, especially in banked cloze.