An Application Of Lexical Chunks To Teaching Of English Reading In Senior High School

Nowadays, reading as a principal means to get information has been valued by more and more people. Meanwhile, the New English Curriculum Standard of senior high school takes the students’reading abilities as a significant part of English teaching. However, so far, there are still a lot of problems existing in the students’ reading process. For instance, a large number of the students pay much attention to grammar and language points. The causes of these problems are as follows:first, it is due to the traditional text analysis method; the second is that the students are lack of reading skills.Presently, the theory of lexical chunks is more and more applied in the field of English teaching. The researchers found that lexical chunks take the advantages of grammar, semantics and context, with the fixed grammatical structures, the stable collocations and the specific pragmatic environment. Consequently, they can accelerate the speed of the language processing and play an important role in the promotion of the students’language fluency, the students’ understanding to the discourse and the students’motivation of language learning. Therefore, the role of lexical chunks is so obvious in the English language teaching. It provides a feasible thinking way for many senior high school students to resolve the reading problems. So the advantage of lexical chunks should be fully used to promote the efficiency of English teaching. On this score, the study intends to investigate the feasibility and validity of lexical chunks in English teaching of reading in senior high school.After drawing lessons from domestic and foreign research achievements related to the lexical chunks and the English teaching of reading, the study takes the cultivation of the students’reading ability as the breakthrough point.Three research questions are put forward in the thesis.1. Can reading take a positive impact on students’ English learning?2. If so, is it helpful for students to make reading more and more effective by applying lexical chunks in English teaching classes of senior high school?3. How do lexical chunks guide the students’ reading in English learning?First of all, the author proposes the theoretical basis of this study, and then uses well-designed experiments to verify it. The subjects are chosen from students of two parallel classes in Grade One of Tongchuan No.l Senior High School. The experimental class adopts the method of reading teaching with lexical chunks while the control class uses the traditional teaching method of reading. After the experiment is carried for one semester, this study respectively conducts two reading tests for the students and uses the statistical software SPSS to analyze the gathered scores. The experimental results show that the scores of the students in the experimental class have been greatly promoted than those in the control class. The results prove that the effectiveness and the feasibility of the application of lexical chunks in the promotion of English teaching of reading in senior high school.