| Vocabulary is an essential building block of language, just as the famous British linguist Wilkins once pointed out,"without grammar few can be conveyed; without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed." from which we can see the great importance of vocabulary learning in language learning. However, many language learners feel that learning vocabulary is quite difficult, and as a high school English teacher, I also find through my long-term teaching practice that vocabulary is a bottleneck problem in students’English study which prevents them from developing further. In most cases, much time is spent on vocabulary learning but it is inefficient. Therefore, more and more English teachers have realized the necessity of teaching vocabulary effectively.Traditional teaching theories think of vocabulary as words and sentences by organizing words with grammar rules. According to the research recently done by some linguists, lexical chunks account for90%of the language in natural communication. Lexical chunks are multi-word units which are prefabricated and occur frequently in daily communication. They have fixed forms and meanings and can be used as a whole directly or after being changed slightly. Chunks are to language what precast panels to buildings. It is unnecessary to analyze the grammatical structure of the chunks inside. In other words, lexical chunks have had grammatical information already. The theory of lexical chunks offers us a new angle for the teaching of English vocabulary.According to different functions in communication, English vocabulary is classified into two categories---receptive vocabulary and productive vocabulary. The former refers to those that can be recognized and whose meaning can be recalled when they are met by the learners. The latter refers to those that can be spoken or written at the appropriate time (Laufer,1998). This classification is helpful for the learners/teachers to determine the depth and width of vocabulary learning/teaching.At present some researchers have done some research into lexical approach on university learners, but research on high school students is limited, especially when concerning something about receptive and productive vocabulary study. So, an experiment has been carried out, introducing Lexical Approach in English teaching, to research the effect of Lexical Approach on receptive and productive vocabulary of high school students. The experiment takes the students of two classes from Jinshi No.1High School in Hunan Province as subjects. Class A is the control class and Class B is the experimental class; students in the two classes are taught in different ways. The experiment lasts two terms (the second term of Grade Two and the first term of Grade Three). During the first three days, the students have been tested for the first time and the content, purpose and procedures of the experiment have been introduced to the students; then in the next two terms, students in Class A are taught with traditional teaching method and students in Class B are taught with lexical approach in listening, speaking, reading and writing training; at the end of the second term, the subjects have been tested for the second time. Nation’s Receptive Vocabulary Size Test has been taken as measurement for receptive vocabulary and Nation’s Productive Vocabulary Levels Test for controlled productive vocabulary. As for free productive vocabulary, the software for Lexical Frequency invented by Nation has been used. After that, all the data has been analyzed using SPSS19.0and conclusion drawn:Lexical approach can increase the receptive vocabulary and productive vocabulary of high school students more than the conventional teaching method. Through the experiment, the hypothesis of the experiment has been tested and the goal of this study has been achieved. |
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