An Application Of Lexical Chunks In Oral English Teaching

The ultimate aim of language teaching is that learners can communicate withtarget language accurately and fluently. For many years, linguists have been doingresearch on language teaching continuously in an attempt to adopt different teachingmethods to reach the goal. Recently, more and more linguists are aware of theimportant role lexical chunks play in second language acquisition. Lexical chunks arephrases on the vocabulary level or some syntactic structures on the sentence level thatfeatures a high level of fixed structure and meaning. These lexical chunks which arestored in the human brain in form of the whole makes it easier to convert thecomplicated syntactic analysis into correspondingly simple chunk processing, greatlyfacilitating language processing and production. We have every reason to believe thatthe application of lexical chunk-based approach to oral English teaching can improvelanguage learners’ oral proficiency.In this research,48primary school students of the sixth grade involve themselvesin this experimental study. All of them attend English classes four times a week in theEnglish-training school run by the author. The research participants are divided intotwo classes, the experiment class (EC) and the control class (CC). In the experimentclass the lexical chunk-based approach is carried out, whereas the traditional teachingapproach is adopted in the control class. Data were collected from oral tests: the pretestand the post-test.The final results of the experiment favor the pre-experiment supposition. Beforethe experiment, there is no significant difference between the two classes in terms ofthe level of English spoken English. And there is evidence that after the experiment theimprovement of students in CC is rather independent from each other, meanwhile, themajority of EC progress at the same time. The number of chunks used is increased andthe type of which is diversified, at the same time, language proficiency is greatlyimproved. According to the questionnaires, statistics show that80%of the students make noticeable progress in oral production from many perspectives. Only8%of thestudents think this lexical-based approach doesn’t work in their favor, which is,nevertheless, the exception that proves the rule.The results demonstrate convincingly that lexical chunk-based oral Englishteaching approach is effective. In view of the effectiveness of this teaching method, theauthor suggests that this teaching method should be valued and put into practice inprimary school English classes. This study would, hopefully, serve as an inspiration forthe application of lexical chunk-based approach in English teaching and learning.