Experimental Research On The Effect Of Chunk-based Dictation On Senior High School Students’ English Listening Ability

Listening is the important and difficult points of English teaching. Most studentshave mastered the essential vocabulary and grammar rules, but it is difficult for themto improve their listening ability. According to the previous researches, the mainobstacle of students’ listening is the vocabulary. Both teachers and students find thatthe key words for listening comprehension are often the collocation units and somesentence patterns, which are called lexical chunks by new researches, and proved tobe efficient units for the memory of vocabulary. Besides, dictation is believed to be aneffective form of practicing lexical chunks.Therefore, the writer attempts to use the lexical approach combined with thedictation practice in English listening teaching, and hopes that this research can behelpful to improving student’s listening ability. Nowadays, linguists and languageteachers in China and abroad focus on the importance of lexical chunks in languagelearning, and there are a few researches on the lexical approach. This thesis attemptsto study the effect of chunk-based dictation in English classes on high school students’listening under the theoretical framework of the theory of lexical approach andanswers the follow two questions:1. Can chunk-based dictation improve students’English listening ability?2. Can chunk-based dictation improve students’ chunkingstrategies of English listening?Two classes from Dongjiang High School are chosen as the subjects of thisresearch and designated as the experimental group and the control group. Thechunk-based dictation was applied to the experimental group while the conventionalsingle word dictation to the control group during the experiment. The instruments ofthe research are the interviews, questionnaires and tests. Based on students’ scores oftests, independent and paired sample T-tests were conducted to test whether therewere significant differences in their listening before and after the experiment.Meanwhile, interviews and questionnaires were also conducted before and after theexperiment to investigate students’ chunking strategies of listening. Then the results show that students share similar listening level before the experiment. However, thepost-test analysis results show that there exists significant difference. Theexperimental group’s listening scores are higher than that of the control group, whichindicates that the application of chunk-based dictation can contribute more to theEnglish listening. Besides, experimental students’ chunking strategies of listeninghave improved obviously, which suggests that the impact of chunk-based dictation hasextended to students’ learning process.The findings of the research indicate that chunk-based dictation contributes moreto the high school students’ English listening compared with the conventional singleword dictation in English classes. Besides, the conclusion can be drawn thatchunk-based dictation can improve students’ scores of English listening effectively，and has a great influence on students’ chunking strategies of English listening. In theview of the teaching activities and research results, we can get the teachingimplications as follows: firstly, in the implementation of chunk-based dictationpractice, the teacher’s first task is to improve the students’ consciousness of lexicalchunks. Secondly, in the process of listening teaching, the teacher should givestudents some strategies about how to catch the key lexical chunks from listeningmaterials. In a word, chunk-based dictation in English classes is feasible and effectivein improving students’ listening ability.