An Empirical Study On Scaffolding Lexical Chunk Approach In College Oral English Class

Nowadays, linguists begin to shift their attention from isolated words and grammar rules to lexical chunks, which are the prefabricated multiword unit that can be saved in memories as a whole and retrieved as an integral form. At the same time, with the development of the corpus linguistics, the importance of lexical chunks has been reinforced and more and more attention has been paid in this field. What is more, The College English Curriculum Requirement points out that the teaching objective of college English is to give priority to developing students’ ability of using English in an all-around way, especially in listening and speaking(Ministry of Education, 2007). Even though the reformation of college English education has gained great achievements recently, more efforts still need to be done in this field, especially on the aspect of the innovation of methodology. Till now, college English teaching still doesn’t have a feasible and efficient lexical chunk-based teaching method.Faced with this situation, this empirical study aims to integrate the lexical chunks into the scaffolding instruction namely, scaffolding lexical chunk approach, and apply it into the college oral English class, trying to find out whether the scaffolding lexical chunk approach can improve the students’ lexical chunk acquisition ability on the aspect of the amount, accuracy and the variability of lexical chunks in their oral production.In this empirical experiment, seventy-five freshmen from the School of History in Zhengzhou University participated in the study. Class One is the EC with 38 students and Class Two is the CC with 37 students. Before the experiment, a pretest was conducted to test students’ amount, accuracy and variability of lexical chunks in their oral production. During the experiment, scaffolding lexical chunk approach was applied to the EC by following the following three steps, the first step, raise students’ sensitivity to lexical chunks: setting up scaffolding, getting into the scene; the second step, enhance students’ discourse generation skills: exploring independently, cooperative learning; the third step, assess the production of the lexical chunks: evaluating effectively(Gai Shuhua, 2010). At the same time, the traditional approach was applied to the CC where no lexical chunks was mentioned. After the experiment, the post-test was carried out in both the EC and CC. And an Exit Questionnaire was issued to eliminate the students who used extra hours after class to learn lexical chunks so as to keep the validity and reliability of the research result.In order to analyze the data both in the pretest and the post test, the descriptive statistics analysis and independent sample t-test in SPSS 20.0 were carried out. The author finds out that: firstly, compared with the traditional approach, scaffolding lexical chunk approach can definitely improve college students’ amount of the lexical chunks in their oral production, and shorten the gap between the advanced students and the students whose mastering of the lexical chunks is comparatively low; secondly, the application of the scaffolding lexical chunk approach to the oral English class is beneficial for the enhancement of the accuracy of the lexical chunks; thirdly, the scaffolding lexical chunk approach can improve the variability of the students’ lexical chunks in their oral production. All in all, the scaffolding lexical chunk approach exerts a positive role in enhancing the non-English major college students’ lexical chunk competence.