A Study Of The Effects Of Lexical Chunks Teaching On Students’ Listening Comprehension Performance

This paper studies the relationship between lexical chunks and listeningcomprehension performance. Lexical chunks can be stored, memorized and retrieved.Corpus linguists and computer scientists have proved that language used in daily life islexical chunks with fixed and semi-fixed structure. Since Michael Lewis (1993)proposes the Lexical Approach, more and more attention has been drawn to lexicalchunks. Numerous researchers have explored the effects of lexical chunks on languageteaching, including all aspects of English learning, which manifest that lexical chunkshave effects on English teaching. However, these studies mainly focus on speaking andwriting, rarely on listening.Based on the Lexical Approach proposed by Lewis, the mental process of listeningcomprehension is analyzed, which aims to illustrate the effects of lexical chunks onlistening comprehension. The paper intends to answer the following questions:(1)whether the lexical approach has influences on the students’ listening comprehensionperformance;(2) whether the lexical approach has effects on the students of differentlistening proficiencies;(3) whether the lexical approach has effects on the students indifferent listening task types. In view of above mentioned questions,141non-Englishmajor students from two classes are selected to participate in the experiment. Before theexperiment, a listening test is carried out in two classes. The analysis results state thatthere is no significant difference in the two classes. According to the results, the twoclasses are randomly assigned: one is an Experimental Class (EC) and the other is aControl Class (CC). The students in the experimental class are taught under theguidance of the lexical approach while the students in the control class are taughtwithout the lexical approach. At the end of the semester, the students in EC and CC aredemanded to be tested again. Through the analysis of the data, the results show that thelistening scores of the students in the experimental class are better than those of thestudents in the control class; the lexical approach has a significant impact on the students in the low score group while it has little impacts on the students in the highscore group; the students in the experimental class do better in blank-filling than thosein the control class. What has been proved in this paper is that the lexical approach canimprove the students’ listening comprehension performance.This paper puts forward that teachers should teach some knowledge about lexicalchunks, establish the students’ awareness of lexical chunks and instruct the listeningteaching in the whole listening teaching process. All in all, lexical approach plays a vitalrole in listening teaching.