An Empirical Study On Application Of The Lexical Chunk Theory In English Vocabulary Teaching At Secondary Vocational School

Vocabulary, as the foundation of all kinds of language activities, plays a vital role in foreign language learning and teaching. The quantity and quality of vocabulary that student have mastered can directly affect their English learning efficiency and their ability of listening, speaking, reading, writing and translating. However, there are still many problems in middle school’s vocabulary teaching. Many teachers often neglect the vocabulary teaching in class or just use the traditional method to explain new words.Students often learn new words by cumming up, which cost them a lot of time and energy.So, how to guide student to remember words and learn English efficiently is an urgent problem to settle.This thesis, combining with the practical teaching, aims to testify the feasibility and effectiveness of the lexical chunk approach in English vocabulary teaching of secondary vocational school. At the same time, this thesis also focuses on the changes of learners’ beliefs, attitudes and interests after adopting lexical chunk approach to English vocabulary teaching.The participants of this research are 91 students of mechanical engineering major in Grade one, Class 2 and Class 3, who come from the secondary vocational school in Jiaxiang, Shan Dong Province. All of them are taught by the author and these two classes are parallel. Class 2 which has 46 students is the contrasted class(CC) and Class 3 is the experimental class(EC) which has 45 students. All the students in these two classes share the same textbook, the same teaching periods(5 classes per week), the same teaching tools(the same teacher, classroom and multimedia) and the same quantity and request of homework. The only difference is that Class 2 as the CC is taught by traditional method and Class 3 as the EC is taught by the lexical chunk approach while teaching vocabulary.Before the teaching experiment, the author conducts an interview for teachers to know the current situation of English vocabulary teaching in this school, a questionnaire and two tests for students to investigate the students’ vocabulary learning strategies and their English level. After the teaching experiment, the author conducts two tests to testify the effectiveness of the lexical chunk approach and a questionnaire for the EC to knowstudents’ attitude towards this approach. All of these data were collected and analyzed by SPSS.The result of the research shows that:(1) Most of the teachers in secondary vocational school are not familiar with the lexical chunk approach, they still use the traditional method to teaching vocabulary. And, a large majority of the students are always adopting the mechanical memory strategies to learning vocabulary.(2) The results of Independent Samples T test and Paired Samples T tests of the four separate tests show that: compared with the average score of CC, the average score of EC has improved a lot; the score of the post-English test is obviously differ from the pre-English test’s in EC, while there is no obvious difference between the pre-English test and post-English test in CC. These results show that lexical chunk approach can improve students’ vocabulary learning efficiency and develop their English comprehensive ability.(3) The majority of students think that lexical chunk approach training aroused their interests in English vocabulary learning and cultivated their self-study ability. At the same tome, they begun to put more emphasis on the learning and accumulating of English vocabulary.