The Application Of Lexical Chunks Theory In English Vocabulary Teaching Of The Senior High School

Wilkins (1972) declares that without grammar very little can be conveyed; without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed. Gass (1999) also points out that vocabulary plays an important role in the acquisition of the second language or foreign language and learning a second language means learning the vocabulary of the language. From what the experts say, it is not difficult to see that vocabulary, as one of the three basic components (pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar) of a language, has its extraordinary influence on one’s daily language learning. With the reform of the new curriculum, the students need to master more and more words in their senior high school, and they can only improve their abilities of listening, speaking, reading, writing and translation on condition that they have mastered enough vocabulary. However, vocabulary teaching in senior high school has always been a big problem for the English teachers. Ever since the1990s, many experts and scholars have done a great amount of research on the methods of vocabulary teaching, among which the lexical chunks approach has also attracted their attention.The research is guided by the lexical chunks theory, and tries to study the application of lexical chunks theory in English vocabulary teaching of senior high school. The purpose of the research is to help the students find an effective way to learn English vocabulary, and also to form the author’s special model of vocabulary teaching. There are five steps in the model, and they are establishing consciousness of lexical chunks, identifying lexical chunks, explaining lexical chunks, consolidating lexical chunks and applying lexical chunks. Firstly, the author proves the importance and necessity of the research through quantities of documents and materials. Then, the different results of the two questionnaires indicate the different acquaintances of the students in the research group before and after the research. At the same time, during one year of the experiment research, the author teaches the vocabulary in a traditional way in the contrasted group, while applies the lexical chunks approach in the research group to direct the students in the research group to establish consciousness of lexical chunks, to learn to identify lexical chunks, to consolidate lexical chunks and to apply lexical chunks through a large number of exercises. At last, the author analyses all the statistics of the results of the questionnaire, the pretest, and the posttests, and comes to the conclusion that it is reasonable and practical to apply the lexical chunks theory in English vocabulary teaching of senior high school.The research allocates applying lexical chunks theory into English vocabulary teaching of Senior High School, and also summarizes an effective model of teaching English vocabulary, which has had a certain effect to the English vocabulary teaching in senior high school.