Application Of Lexical Approach In Oral English Classroom Teaching In Vocational College

The lexical approach (LA) has been put forward for more than two decades. Althoughthe lexical chunks theory has been a quickening of interest in China since a decade ago, it hasnot been a main stream at home and it is still a controversial topic for a large number ofteachers. Some argue that it is over-relied on teaching experience and lack of systematictheory foundation while others consider the application of lexical chunk theory in classroomleads to low efficiency.This thesis describes a more holistic LA theoretical system from a socio-culturalperspective, which discovers the important role of background schema in the development ofimplicit language system.The present research is an empirical study of the application of lexical approach invocational college oral English teaching in an attempt to explore a better oral Englishteaching method for vocational college students. The researcher of this paper explored theefficiency of LA-based oral English teaching in a vocational college.This thesis discusses the practical ways for learners to acquire lexical chunks effectivelyby analyzing the improper methodologies to apply LA in classroom experiments in somemaster’s thesis. Some important yet easily neglected principles of LA have been emphasizedin this thesis, which may be beneficial to correct the literal interpretation of lexical chunkteaching. The thesis clarifies whether input is more important than output for EFL;distinguishes teachers’ discourse and authentic input, mechanical drills and meaningfullearning; proposes the significance of repeated input to the developing of implicit languagenetwork. The concept of “super chunks” proposed here, which integrate phonology,morphology, semantics, and syntactic grammar into implicit network with the relevantcontextual information including situation, cultural background, interlocutors’ facialexpression or body language. The researcher also mentions chunking competence is moreimportant than chunks acquisition for SLA in this thesis.To testify the views above, an empirical research was conducted among120students offoreign nursing department in Chengde Nursing Vocational College（NVC）. The research instruments include: questionnaires, tests, and classroom experiment. The students weredivided into two parallel groups, one is experimental group (EG) with LA-based oral Englishteaching method, the other is control group (CG) with traditional teaching approaches. Thereis no significant difference of the speaking scores between EG and CG in pre-test on thestudents’ oral exam. The post-test data are from authoritative IELTS score of these120students at the end of the four-month experiment. Questionnaires were answered by all theparticipants to find out their differences before and after the experiment.Finally a conclusion is drawn from the data obtained from the analysis of results ofpre-test and post-test as well as questionnaires. The results show that LA is more effectivethan traditional teaching approaches in improving the vocational college students’ Englishspeaking competence. There is a significant correlation between chunking competence andspeaking competence. What is more, there is also a significant correlation between speaking,listening, reading and writing. Mastering more chunks can help to improve the vocationalcollege students’ ability of listening, reading and writing.