Application Of Lexical Chunk Approach To English Listening Teaching In Vocational College

Listening is an essential language skill, the foundation to develop speaking, reading, and writing ability. Lewis, Nattinger and DeCarrico’s works on lexical chunks lay a theoretical basis for lexical approach. Lexical chunk begins to be considered as an ideal unit in language learning. In the listening teaching and learning, lexical chunks can facilitate listening comprehension by increasing the capacity of short-term memory and finally speed up listening comprehension. In spite of the advantages of lexical chunks on listening teaching and learning, researches on the application of lexical chunks to listening comprehension of vocational college are rare, especially the empirical researches. However, vocational college students find it difficult to learn English, and even feel fed up with English. Therefore, improving students’listening ability plays a key role in enhancing their overall language ability and learning interests. This paper hence attempts to do an empirical study on this aspect with the purpose of enhancing students’ listening skill and checking the efficiency of lexical chunk approach in EFL listening of vocational colleges. This study tries to answer the following questions:1) To what extent can the lexical chunk approach improve the vocational college students’listening ability?2) What is the specific teaching method?3) How will the students respond to the teaching method?The main research methodology the paper adopts is empirical study. An experiment is conducted in Guangxi Agricultural Vocational and Technical College for12weeks. Two intact classes of first year students are chosen as subjects, totaling69. One class is the control group, in which the traditional listening teaching method is applied. The other class is the experimental group, in which the lexical chunk approach is employed. Both these two classes are taught by the author. The research instruments the author adopts are listening tests, questionnaires and interviews. The results are collected and analyzed mainly by SPSS and Excel.The results of the research show that lexical chunk approach can improve the English listening ability of the vocational college students. The result of listening tests show that listening proficiency of the experimental class is improved to some extent, while that of the control class is hardly improved. The questionnaires display the lexical chunk awareness of experimental class has been raised a lot. The interviews demonstrate a great majority of students like the lexical chunk approach. However, due to vocational college students’ weakness in English, such as small vocabulary, nonstandard pronunciation, and non-linguistic factors like insufficient background knowledge and weak learning autonomy, lexical chunk approach alone can’t improve their listening proficiency enormously. Therefore, this paper proposes a teaching method of combining lexical chunk instruction with other necessary listening skills training. First, teachers and students should have the lexical chunk awareness. Second, teachers are expected to foster students’ ability to apply lexical chunks to listening comprehension. Emphasis should be placed on training students’sound identification ability of lexical chunks. Third, a variety of classroom activities should be designed for students to practice the newly learned lexical chunks so as to make them internalized. Finally, teachers should encourage students to accumulate a rich store of lexical chunks. They should encourage students to do more listening practice after class and enhance students’memory of lexical chunks through regular dictation.