An Empirical Study On The Effectiveness Of The Application Of Lexical Chunks Approach To English Reading Teaching In Senior High School

With the New National English Curriculum Standards for senior high school Englishteaching issued, the reading competence of senior school students is increasingly valued.Many teachers are trying various teaching approaches to improve students’ readingproficiency while students are also required to do a large number of reading comprehensionitems to improve their reading competence. However, these efforts are far from enough. It islikely that some students still have poor performance in reading comprehension. This thesisattempts to explore a more effective way of reading teaching by applying lexical chunksapproach to EFL reading comprehension.Lexical chunks approach, under the belief that language consists of a series of combinedstable chunks, is a language teaching theory put forward by Lewis in1993. The stability oflexical chunks and their predictability in a semantic text decreased the difficulty of languageacquisition. Being aware of lexical chunks allows learners to shift their learning fromindividual words to chunks, which helps them to get a clear structure of a sentence and even atext and finally improve their reading proficiency. Different from the traditionalgrammar-based teaching method, the lexical chunks approach is gradually showing its uniqueadvantages in language teaching especially in speaking, listening, reading and writing. Inrecent years, the application of lexical chunks approach to EFL learning and teaching hasreceived great attention of many linguists and language educators as an alternative togrammar-based approaches. More and more researches on lexical chunks have arisen in thelast decade, which also shows its significant role in EFL teaching and learning.This thesis intends to explore the effect of applying lexical chunks approach to EFLreading. Altogether107subjects from two art classes of Senior-Grade-Two of Shilin No.lMiddle School were involved in the study. Among them,56students in the experimental classreceived training of lexical chunks approach, while the other51students in the control classfollowed the traditional teaching way. The experiment lasted for fifteen weeks. Bothqualitative and quantitative research approaches were employed in the study. All thequantitative data collected from the tests and the questionnaires were input into SPSS11.5forstatistical analysis, while the qualitative data from the interview were recorded for further analysis. The results show that the students in the EC performed better than the students inthe CC in reading proficiency. Based on the findings, it can be concluded that learners withthe knowledge of lexical chunks can perform better in English reading, which, as a result,would contribute to an improvement in their English learning proficiency. To sum up, theapplication of lexical chunks approach to reading is very effective in senior high schools.However, the research is not perfect. The limitations of this study and suggestions forfurther research are proposed at the end of the thesis. For example, the research focuses muchattention on studying the effectiveness of lexical chunks approach on learners’ readingcompetence. However, it fails to find out on which aspect of reading competence theapproach affects most and to what extent the approach is effective in improving students’reading proficiency. Therefore, observations are still necessary to figure out answers to thesequestions. Besides, the research may also provide some implications for further study onapplication of lexical chunks to other aspects of English teaching.