On The Influence Of The Lexical Chunks On Science Students’ Reading Competence In Senior High School

China’s rapid development in various aspects arouses the attention and interest of the whole world, which leads to different kinds of cooperation and communication. During the processes of cooperating and communicating, the language of English plays an essential and important role. As a consequence, we gradually become conscious that English is more a tool with which we can get useful information, experience diverse cultures and promote communication, than a simple subject.By comparing and analyzing the four skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing, we find that reading comprehension is one of the most important ways for students to input, to which students and teachers devote a lot of time and energy. What’s more, as is precisely stipulated in English Curriculum Criterion of the Full-time Compulsory Education issued by the Chinese Ministry of Education (2003), reading comprehension bears many functions and learning and teaching aims. Consequently, teachers should seek an effective way to aid students in improving their reading competence.On the other hand, in The National Matriculation English Test (NMET), students have to read4passages to answer20multiple choice questions. Meanwhile, students also need to read1passage to answer5questions with their own words. And all the questions together account for60marks in the paper, which takes up40%of the full marks.So neither students nor teachers can learn English well without paying enough attention to reading comprehension, especially science students who are blind in English learning and who need more guidance from teachers. So the author applied the lexical approach to reading teaching to science students, in which view a language is made up of lexical chunks with corresponding functions instead of irregular words and phrases.This study focuses on the effect the lexical approach has on science students’ reading competence. In order to prove the effect, the author design a series of teaching plans and teaching activities. Before the experiment was made, the author carried out a questionnaire on art and science students to make clear whether science students have different learning styles from art students, to get to know what the differences are, in order to make sure whether science students need more guidance in reading learning. The author chose2classes in senior2in Tianjin Experimental High School, one as the experimental class and the other one controlled class. And a pre-test and a post-test were carried out in order to get to know the students’learning state before and after the experiment. With the experimental data the author collected, the author got the conclusion that the lexical approach really works on science students’ reading competence.