Effects Of Lexical Chunk Instruction On Higher Vocational College Students’ English Listening Ability:An Empirical Study

This thesis mainly attempts to explore the effects of lexical chunk instruction on students’ listening ability in Higher Vocational Colleges. As we all know, listening is the main way of language input and it takes up a large proportion of about one-quarter in practical English examinations. Since the appearance of the Lexical Approach by Michael Lewis(1993), researchers have been paying more and more attention on lexical chunks. Numerous scholars have explored the relationship between lexical chunks and language proficiency. However, most of these studies fix their attention on vocabulary, speaking and writing, rarely on listening. There are some gaps to bridge. On one hand, most of the research subjects are English major students in universities or middle school students rather than the vocational college students who are usually not interested in English learning and often get unsatisfying results in the examinations. They need patient and professional teachers’ guidance and instruction. On the other hand, though we have reached an agreement that lexical chunk instruction can promote students’ English listening ability, there is controversy on whether the high level group or the low level group benefit more. Moreover, Practical English Test for Colleges(grade B) is appropriate for the five-year vocational college students in difficulty, that’s why I choose it as the test paper.Therefore, theoretically based on Krashen’s Input Hypothesis,Information Processing Model and Listening Models, the thesis attempts to explore the impact of lexical chunk instruction on higher vocational college students’ listening ability. Thus, two research questions are addressed in this research:(1) To what extent does lexical chunk instruction help improve higher vocational college students’ listening ability?(2) What differences does the lexical chunk instruction have on students with different language proficiency in higher vocational colleges?In order to answer the above two questions, the author carries out the research in which students in Hunan Vocational College of Modern Logistic serve as subjects. First of all, two classes of the same major and grade are chosen at random, one of which serves as the control group and the other as the experimental group. Then, we conduct an 18-week listening lesson conforming to the lexical chunk instruction in the experimental group. The author analyzes the results qualitatively and quantitatively. The results are as follows:(1) Lexical chunk instruction help improve higher vocational college students’ listening ability. Results of students in EC change significantly, while students in CC gain no apparent change.(2) There are improvements on all levels of the higher vocational students after using lexical chunk instruction. The low-level students improve their scores significantly in contrast with the high-level students’, while the high- level group gets the highest marks in the pre-test and post-test. The role of lexical chunk in listening comprehension is vital. So it is the core of English listening teaching to help strengthen the vocational college students’ awareness of lexical chunks and promote the intake of lexical chunks. All in all, lexical chunk instruction is of vital importance for vocational college students’ English listening ability.As the research aims to explore and tackle practical teaching problems in a certain language group, it is of great significance. However, there are still some limitations at present. Since the number of subjects is limited and the research was done in a school, it is a little hard to absolutely convince the reader.