| This study is an empirical study based on lexical chunks to investigate if they would be helpful to improve efficiency of college English vocabulary teaching. Vocabulary learning is the basis of language input and output, without which one cannot use a language effectively. Only when learners are equipped with enough vocabulary will they make progress in abilities for listening, speaking, reading and writing. The traditional way of vocabulary teaching in college fails to help students to memorize new words or to make great influence on the efficiency of vocabulary learning. Therefore, non-English majors face the problem of English vocabulary learning, and most of them are afraid of using new words and expressions in communication. However, in this new global age, English, as a very useful language in people’s daily life and work, should be mastered well. So it is crucial for English teachers and researchers to find an effective way to help students with vocabulary learning and greatly improve their ability of language output, that is to say, their productive competence.“The lexical chunk”, as a lexico-grammatical unit, is proposed by many linguists, and we believe it offers a promising direction for language teaching. Decarrico and Nattinger state, “Lexical phrases are multi-word lexical phenomena that exist somewhere between the traditional poles of lexicon and syntax, conventionalized form/function composites that occur more frequently and have more idiomatically determined meaning than language that is put together each time”(De Carrico & Nattinger, 2000:1). Lexical chunks are also treated as cognitive units stored in the long-term memory by practicing again and again, and they can help reduce processing burden when more attention can be given to the overall structure of the idea.On the basis of the lexical approach, the writer endeavored to apply lexical chunks to college English vocabulary teaching. To investigate the function of the lexical approach, an empirical study was carried out in Henan Agricultural University with 60 subjects of nonEnglish majors from the same school in their freshman year. The 60 students were divided into two classes, the experimental class and the control class. On the precondition that the two classes have similar English proficiency before the research, the lexical approach was applied to the experimental class for one semester, and students from the control class were taught by the traditional teaching method.This thesis focuses on the following research questions: 1) Do lexical chunks help college students with English vocabulary learning? 2) Do college students of non-English majors have the awareness of learning and using lexical chunks after this research? 3) Do college students of non-English majors have the awareness of learning and using lexical chunks after this research? 4) Do lexical chunks promote students’ interest and confidence in English learning?In order to have a comprehensive study on these subjects, the author used quantitative analyses. The research methods include questionnaire, teaching experiment, interviews. And in pretest and posttest, students’ written production were taken as testing point, the researcher collected testing data and analyzed it with the help of SPSS 13.0. The result showed that the means of the experimental class(EC) and the control class(CC) respectively were 83.57 and 74.03 in the posttest. Apparently, the posttest score of EC was higher than that of CC. The significance value in Levine’s Test for Equality of Variances was 0.054, which means P value was more than 0.05 and the variances of the two classes were equal. Therefore, we need to check the data of the “Equal variances assumed” row as the result of the t-test. The Sig.(2-tailed) from the independent samples test in the posttest was 0.000, which was smaller than 0.05, which indicated that there was a significant difference between the two classes in the posttest after the experimental treatment. Students of EC improved their writing scores more than students from CC did. All possible variables being controlled to the greatest degree, it is concluded that lexical chunks theory is valid in English teaching and learning for college nonEnglish majors.According to the analysis, we can draw the following conclusions: 1) Lexical chunks can help college students with English vocabulary learning; 2) College students of nonEnglish majors have the awareness of learning and using lexical chunks after this research; 3) The lexical approach improves students’ ability to use various kinds of lexical chunks and to make more accurate and idiomatic expressions in English; 4) Lexical chunks can promote students’ interest and confidence in English learning. |
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