| Recently private colleges have become an indispensable part of the national higher education system, and play a crucial role in higher education popularization. Graduates from private colleges are gradually becoming an important force to promote the national economic development. Therefore, how to accomplish the higher education’s transition from being elite-oriented to public-oriented as well as how to guarantee the teaching quality of private colleges is important issue to solve urgently. With regard to the public English, how to help students acquire English rather than stay on the surface, is a critical issue that college teachers have to face and resolve.Listening teaching is an important part in the course of college English teaching. Meanwhile, English teachers constantly put emphasis on the significance of listening skill in the process of English teaching. In the practical teaching, however, how to teach listening is a considerable and challenging puzzle. In fact, quite a few teachers stick firmly to the traditional mode of listening teaching and overemphasize overall listening teaching and skills, which ignore the crucial guidance where the particularities of teaching objects should be concerned, for instance, the cultivation of the consciousness of lexical chunks. There is a special English language phenomenon existing between the traditional grammar and vocabulary but having both lexical features and grammatical features, namely, lexical chunk. It is a prefabricated group of words used in relatively fixed form and stable context.This empirical study attempts to introduce the concept of lexical chunks to college English listening teaching, focuses on exploring that the efficacy of the application of lexical chunk approach to college English listening teaching as well as the function of lexical chunks in private college students’listening comprehension.In this empirical study,80sophomores are selected as subjects who come from Shengda Trade Economics and Management College of Zhengzhou, and then they are divided into the experimental class (38students) and the control class (42students). In order to testify whether the research objects from the experimental class and those from the control class have roughly equal English proficiency level and are qualified to participate in the empirical study, the author designs a group of pretests to check both their chunk competence and listening competence. Then followed the fourteen-week experimental teaching, during which the teacher puts emphasis on lexical chunks teaching in the experimental class, but does not emphasize the use of lexical chunks in the control class. Meanwhile, the author designs a classroom observation table to record class reflection and students’involvement in various kinds of class activities for every listening class. Near the end of the experimental teaching, interviews and a questionnaire is conducted to investigate students’attitude towards lexical chunks approach employed in listening as well as explore whether lexical chunks teaching works from the perspective of the students. Finally, posttests are carried out to explore the efficacy of the application of lexical chunk approach to college English listening teaching with statistical data.The data of the paper are mainly analyzed by the statistical analysis software SPSS19.0, which testify the summary of class observation and survey mutually. The results indicate that lexical chunks acquisition is able to overcome the limitations of short-term memory, lessen the burden of working memory, improve listeners’ predictive ability and boost their listening comprehension for long sentences or even a discourse. What’s more, listeners’nervousness and anxiety is reduced while the confidence and interests in listening are roused finally. Therefore, the application of lexical chunk approach to college English listening teaching can raise students’ awareness of lexical chunks in a comparatively short period of time and promote students’listening performance. |
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