The Empirical Study On Lexical Teaching In Improving Non-English Major Students Oral English Competency

A lexical chunk is a formulaic and frequently used collection of words, which areprefabricated and can be quickly retrieved from the memory during the speech production. Inrecent years, more people realize that lexical chunks play an important role in secondlanguage acquisition and communication. Being rather stable in meaning and structure, theselexical chunks are stored in human brain in form of the whole, and help to simplify thecomplex syntactic analysis, facilitate language processing and ease the burden of languageproduction. As a result, the English learners’ oral competency would be greatly improved.And lexical approach, which is focusing on the lexical chunks, has a great feasibility and farmore advantages than other traditional oral teaching approaches.Based on the current theories and research findings on lexical chunks, combining withthe Levelt’s model of speech production, this thesis illustrates the importance of lexicalphrases in language production. In this research, two non-English major classes from GanNanNormal University Technology School participate in this research for one semester. Thestudents in these two classes are all freshmen who are just enrolled in2012. Quantitative andqualitative methodologies are also used in order to confirm the effectiveness of improvingstudents’ oral competency.In this research, the EC were taught in lexical approach while CC in traditional teachingapproach, and data collected from the pre-test and post-test show that although there is nosignificant gap between two classes before experiment, after the experiment, the students inEC have made more improvement in speech production, including the number of chunk used,accuracy and fluency, than the students in CC. And according to the questionnaires, statisticsshow that more than75%students in EC hold that their speech production has been enhanced.The author hopes that English teachers and learners can attach more importance tolexical chunks and can initiatively put them into use in improving oral English competency.