The Application Of Lexical Chunk To English Vocabulary Teaching In Junior Middle School

It is well known that vocabulary is an important part of language and plays a crucial role in language teaching and learning. Four skills of the language(listening, speaking, reading and writing) are on basis of the mastery of vocabulary. Therefore, it is necessary to master a large amount of vocabulary in each period of language learning. The vocabulary teaching gains more and more attention. However, many junior middle school teachers don’t pay enough attention to vocabulary teaching.Teachers teach students new words according to the word list and then let students recite new words over and over again. Students can’t memorize new words firmly and don’t have fun in English learning. Meanwhile they have a strong sense of frustration.The vocabulary teaching method based on lexical-chunk theory lets students learn new words as a whole not as a single word. This teaching method can not only reduce the difficulty of memorizing new words but also make students memorize new words for a longer time. Based on the lexical chunks, the experiment explores whether applying lexical chunks to vocabulary teaching can improve students’ vocabulary scores andarouse students’ interest in vocabulary learning.The author chose two classes in No.4 Junior High School in Xilinhot to conduct the experiment which lasted almost one semester. One of the classes was appointed as the experimental group, where the lexical-chunk method was employed, and the other as the control group, where the traditional teaching method was in use. Two hypotheses are testified in this research: a) The lexical chunks improve the students’ English vocabulary score. b)The 1exical-chunk method makes the junior students more interested in English vocabulary learning.During the experimental period, two questionnaires and two final exams were given to the students. The author analyzed the quantitative results by SPSS. Through this experiment, answer the two questions:1)Can the lexical-chunk method improve the students’ English vocabulary learning ability? 2) Does lexical-chunk method make the junior students more interested in English vocabulary learning? We find that it is feasible to apply lexical chunks to Junior Two English vocabulary teaching. The lexical chunk method can help to enhance the vocabulary teaching and help learners acquire vocabulary more effectively. The lexical chunk method to vocabulary teaching could also arouse students interest in vocabulary learning.