An Experimental Study On The Effects Of The Lexical Approach On Primary School Students’ English Listening Comprehension

In spite of the important role of English listening, many primary school studentswith weak English listening find it difficult to comprehend what they have heard.They find that they will forget the former when they listen to the latter part of longsentences, which prevent them from comprehending the meaning of the wholesentence properly. In primary school English teaching, the author finds that it is thebottle-neck of listening teaching. Consequently, it is necessary to carry on the researchof the Lexical Approach and solve this problem.Since the Lexical Approach was first presented by Lewis, it has been concernedby more and more linguists, scholars and foreign language teachers abroad and athome. It emphasizes the role of multi-word units.The Lexical Approach research is a new trend in foreign language teachingabroad and in China, and its results spring up like mushrooms. However, theresearches mainly focused on the output of the language, especially on oral fluencyand writing. The subjects in the researches were mainly university or college students.In one of the researches, the subjects were primary school students, but the number ofthe samples was only8. Based on the theory of the Lexical Approach, this researchhad an experiment on90primary school students. Its purpose is to test the effects ofthe Lexical Approach on primary school students’ lexical chunk competence andlistening comprehension, and provides some feasible advice on primary schoolEnglish teaching. This thesis utilizes the Statistical Package for the Social SciencesRelease19.0for windows (SPSS19.0) to build a quantitative and instructive platformfor analyses and recommendations.The research questions in this study are:1. Can the Lexical Approach improveprimary school students’ English listening comprehension?2. Can the Lexical Approach improve primary school students’ lexical chunkcompetence?The major findings of the study were summarized as follows: Firstly, there was no significant difference in their lexical chunk competence andEnglish listening comprehension between the two groups in post-test1. However, it islearned that students in the EG shortened the distance with those in the CG in terms oflexical chunk competence and English listening comprehension.Secondly, there was a significant difference between the two groups in theirlexical chunk competence and listening comprehension in post-test2. Therefore, it islearned that students in the EG had much better lexical chunk competence andlistening comprehension than those in the CG.In conclusion, the Lexical Approach can improve primary school students’listening comprehension；it can enhance primary school students’ lexical chunkcompetence. It is confirmed that the Lexical Approach is really an effective approachin the primary school English listening teaching.This research illustrates that at the initial stage of foreign language learning, theemphasis of primary school English teaching should lie on the awareness-raising andhabit-formation of lexical chunks, which leads the students’ English learning tosustainable development.