A Chunk-Based Experimental Study Of Teaching Of English Reading In Senior High School

As an important way of input, reading is vital in English teaching of high school.According to the requirements of New English Curriculum Criteria, high school students arerequired to master the ability of discourse comprehension, and learn to get and processinformation. However, high school students’ reading ability is generally low, which can notmeet the requirements of New English Curriculum Criteria. Therefore, how to improve it hasbecome the major concern of researchers. Lexical chunks, as multiword structures, can bestored and retrieved as a whole. The linguists find that almost everything we say, hear, read orwrite can be found in some forms of lexical chunks and that a student who has a largevocabulary will only be able to function in a fairly limited way while the other student whouses lexical chunks will be far more communicatively competent. With the development ofpsychology and corpus linguistics, more and more scholars on English teaching are becominginterested in the research of lexical chunks. In recent years, although the number of scholarsengaged in the research of chunks application is increasing and most of them are paying moreattention to the empirical research, the research of English teaching in high school，especiallythat of English reading is relatively insufficient.This research is based on the study of psychology and corpus linguistics. According tothe requirements of reading teaching, the author integrates the result of existing research.Thelexical chunks are prefabricated structures made up of two or more words, which frequentlyco-occur and can be stored and retrieved as a whole. They can be divided into five kinds asthe following, collocation, polywords, institutionalized expressions, sentence builders andfixed phrases. In addition, the author put forward a new way of picking out the lexical chunks,which is the combination of corpus-based approach and the knowledge of teachers. Based onthese theories, the two hypotheses were put forward. The first is that lexical approach mightbe a good way to improve the English reading acquisition; and the second is that the lexicalapproach might be better than traditional approaches in reading. In order to test whether the hypotheses were true or not, an empirical research plan was designed.96subjects wereselected from Senior Three of Zhangzhou No.3Middle School. All of them were from twonatural parallel classes. The experiment lasted for about sixteen weeks. The experimentalstatistic was collected and analyzed by the software SPSS16.0. The result of experimentshows that after the experiment there have been notable differences in reading efficiencybetween the experimental class and the control class.In conclusion, the results of experiment suggest that the lexical approach is a good wayto improve the English reading ability. The lexical approach is not only helpful to the readingof high school teaching but also contributes to the positive transformation in language,cognitive reaction and other non-intelligent factors. Based on the result of the research, theauthor gives some suggestions on lexical approach, such as the cultivation of the awareness ofchunks, making proper learning plans for students and expanding the number of stored chunks.Although some limitations still exist in this study, as on one of the ways of teaching pattern,lexical approach can be applied and populated, which is believed to have great implicationsfor foreign language learning and teaching in the future.