An Empirical Study On Lexical Approach In The English Translation Teaching In Vocational College

In recent years, vocational college education has obtained fast development. Under the new situation, vocational college English teaching is facing enormous challenges. According to the English teaching basic requirements of the vocational college education issued by higher education department of education ministry, vocational English education should not only strengthen English language elementary knowledge and basic skills training, but also should pay much attention to the cultivation of the students’practical ability to use English. In the case of English translation teaching in vocational college it is necessary to cultivate students’ translation competence. This paper tries to demonstrate effective translation teaching method to improve the quality of translation teaching in higher vocational colleges and improve the higher vocational college students’ability in practical translation.The study on Lexical Chunks has attracted plenty of attention in recent years. According to the theory of chunks teaching from Michael Lewis (1993), language is composed of grammatical lexical chunks that have relatively fixed form and meaning, and these lexical chunks are stored as a whole in human’s brain primarily in the form of kinds of stereotyped collocations, fixed or semi-fixed phrases, and idioms, which needn’t any syntax analysis.Lexical chunks advocate that the sequence of second language acquisition should imitate the first language learning process, that is, it emphasizes that the second language acquisition learners should first learn a lot of discourse meanings of the stereotypes of lexical chunks in the real language environment, in which the lexical chunks’ structure and syntax are analyzed and summarized. This study, along with the characteristics of lexical chunks, applies the teaching theory of lexical chunks from Lewis to the higher vocational English translation teaching so as to help students solve the common problems of language output and aim to cultivate the students’ consciousness of Lexical Chunks, skillfully use of lexical chunks and improve their English translation competence, which can meet the demand of vocational college students’English ability.There are seventy students involved in the experiment who are majoring in the city gas engineering technology from class1301and1302, Applied Technique College of Southwest Petroleum University. The experiment lasts one semester. The teaching material is "AN INTEGRATED SKILLS COURSE". The lexical chunk teaching is throughout the process of the experiment, and the design of the teaching is centered on the lexical chunks. After a series of process of language input, absorption and output, students will cultivate the consciousness of the lexical chunks, pay attention to the use of the lexical chunks and form good habit of learning language chunks, which will help to explore the effectiveness of the lexical chunks on the vocational college students’ translation competence.According to the above conclusion, lexical approach, compared with traditional teaching method, can improve higher vocational college students’ translation competence. However, because students in higher vocational college participated as subject are lack of learning motivation, the experimental data will be affected more or less, therefore, the author points out the limitations of this study, hoping to promote the future related research in this field.This study, with the assistance of SPSS17.0statistical software package for the data analysis in the control group and experimental group before and after the experiment, and adopting independent sample T test and paired sample T test and other statistical methods, it comes to the following conclusions:The more number of the use of lexical chunks, the higher translation results students can get in the process of translation from Chinese into English translation. Lexical approach has a positive impact on the expression of the Chinese-to-English translation and reduces vocabulary and grammatical mistakes to some extent. And Lexical approach can reduce the understanding mistakes in English-to-Chinese translation, and enhance the accuracy of the English-to-Chinese translation.