Empirical Study On Lexical Chunk-based Teaching In Oral Business English Class For Vocational College Students

Lexical chunks have attracted more and more attention in EFL (English as ForeignLanguage) teaching in recent years. Many language researchers and teachers find thatlexical chunks vastly existing in natural discourses. These lexical chunks combine thefunctions of syntax, semantics and context in one which makes them convenient to beretrieved as a whole and makes it possible to shorten language processing. So lexicalchunks have been introduced into English researches and teaching field for years,including oral English teaching.Different from previous studies, which mostly targeted at graduates orundergraduates, this research is to explore the possibility of lexical chunk-based teachingguided by Constructivism in oral English class for college students, and find out its effectsand reasons with relevant analysis.In this thesis, the author will first find out students’ problems in oral English learningby an interview and a questionnaire. Then, a teaching experiment based on lexical chunksguided by Constructivism will be carried out. Two natural classes majoring in businessEnglish will be randomly selected from Foreign Language Department in HengshuiVocational and Technical College to be taken as experimental class and control class. In atwo-term teaching experiment, lexical chunk-based teaching plan guided byConstructivism and traditional teaching plan will be carried out respectively in these twoclasses. Relevant data will be collected during the experiment, and then following researchquestions will be discussed:1) Is chunk-based teaching method effective in improving students’ oral Englishcompetence?2) How could chunk-based teaching method help to improve students’ oral Englishcompetence?With the analysis to the data colleted during the research, the author has drawn theconclusion as follows:1) Chunk-based teaching method is effective in improving students’ oral Englishcompetence. This has been proved by statistics during the research.2) Chunk-based teaching method could help to improve business English students’oral English competence by:Firstly, increasing students’ stock of vocabulary, which can make students’ employing of words more reasonable and more flexible. It is also a useful method in improvingstudents’ lexical diversity.Secondly, improving students’ oral English accuracy. Due to unique natures of lexicalchunks, i.e. prefabrication and partly grammaticalization, students can avoid some oralerrors caused by poor knowledge of grammatical rules or syntactic rules.Thirdly, enhancing students’ oral English fluency. This is mainly attributed to theprefabrication nature, or we can say semi-product nature of lexical chunks. By employingthese semi-products, the difficulty of language processing will be greatly decreased. Alsothe time needed by language processing will also be reduced. By using lexical chunks,language processing could be much easier and more efficient.Finally, the author will summarize the whole research and point out the limitationsexisting in this empirical study and future direction for further study.