A Study On The Application Of Lexical Chunk Approach To College English Reading Teaching

According to College English Syllabus for non-English majors, the aim of English teaching is to practice a strong ability to listen, speak, write and translate, making students communicate in English fluently. In the long run, English reading has played a main role for learners to acquire knowledge. Many teachers are also conscious of the importance of cultivating students’reading ability. However, the results are far from perfect and satisfying. Especially non-English major students in college, they still have many difficulties in reading comprehension. And there are no better ways to solve this problem. Hence, many teachers still applied their traditional teaching methodology to the reading class, so students’reading ability was difficult to be improved.Since the lexical chunk approach has been brought into the linguistic field in the1970’s, it has attracted more and more attention of many scholars and linguists who dedicated to researching the relationship between the lexical chunk approach and English learning. More and more scholars assume that lexical chunk has many advantages in language teaching. Lexical chunks, or lexical phrases, are frequently-used and pre-fabricated word-combinations with their own structures and fixed meanings. They can also be adopted as pre-fabricated chunk after being modified partially and wholly.(Yao Baoliang,2003:23) That is to say, lexical chunk exists in human’s brain as a whole. When human beings want to use them, they will extract them as a whole unit conveniently. Thus, the lexical chunk approach avoids regarding the reading text as a single unit. And it also makes students avert their attention to the whole discourse structure rather than single words. So it maybe improves students’ reading achievements. This paper aims to investigate the relationship between lexical chunk approach and reading comprehension. In this study, there are109students of Grade2013, participating in the experiment from the major software, class1301,1302,1305,1306, in Taiyuan University of Technology (TYUT). Before the experiment, a pre-test was conducted in these109students. The author made the class of lower mean score the experimental class (EC) and the other as the control class (CC). There are54students in EC and55students in CC.The research lasted for six months, from October,2013to March,2014. The lexical chunk approach was used in reading class in EC, while the traditional teaching method was used in CC. After finishing the training, there was a post-test paper handed out to all subjects to see whether the lexical chunk approach has an effect on reading proficiency. There are two questions proposed by the author.(1) Is there any effect on improving reading ability and level for non-English major students by applying lexical chunk approach to college reading class?(2) What kind of impact does the lexical chunk approach have on students’ reading proficiency?The results of the research prove that applying lexical chunk approach to reading class has an effect on improving students’ reading ability. Through the analysis of post-test in EC, the mean score of students in EC increased by3.667points and the reading time increased by4.7771minutes. Thus, applying lexical chunk approach to college reading class plays a positive role in improving students’ reading ability.