An Investigation Into Chinese High School Students’Use Of Memory Strategy In Lexical Chunks Learning

In recent years, with the development of psycholinguistic and cognitive linguistics, researchers have paid much attention to human being’s memory which plays a significant part in language learning. The memory strategy, therefore, becomes an important language learning strategy. At the same time, as the corpus linguistics has set up, it is found that the language learning does not solely depend on the vocabulary, but the larger teaching and learning unit-lexical chunks. Thus, separating the grammar knowledge and vocabulary is the shackle of improving foreign language proficiency. Literature review shows that most discourse in daily life are composed of lexical chunks with various lengths. Learning a number of lexical chunks used in certain occasion can help improve learners’English level and English skills.In this study, the quantitive method which was the questionnaire, and qualitative method which was the interview have been adopted, where the participants are from a senior high school in Beijing. In the survey by questionnaires, it mainly discussed students’general condition of using memory strategy to lean lexical chunks, analyzed how the students from second year of senior high use different kinds of memory strategies, and compared the using frequency and characteristics of students of different sex at different English levels. We also interviewed students from three groups of English proficiency in order to investigate their use of memory strategies and lexical chunks respectively. The results reveal that there is a close relationship between learners’memory strategy use and their lexical chunks learning situation.