On The Impact Of Lexical Approach Upon P Rimary Schools Students’ English Vocabulary Learning

In the study of second language acquisit ion,the concept of chunk has been one of the hot topics in recent twenty or thirty years for researchers both at home and abroad. In China, Yang Yuchen(1995) is the first linguist who paid particular attention on chunks. With the establishment of Chinese learner English Corpus(CLEC) and College Learners? Spoken English Corpus(COLSEC), some researches were gradually done based on the frequency analysis. Studies of chunks at home present a diversified development trend on content, language and method.However, most subjects in these studies are college students. There are few studies focusing on primary school students. In fact, most students start learning English from primary school in China, so it will shed some new light to the application of lexical approach to primary school for English teaching and the study of chunk in the early stage.This study employs the theory of lexical approach and information processing as theoretical framework to research the impact of lexical approach upon primary school students? English vocabulary learning. Lexical approach emphasizes the key point of English teaching should be collocations, institutionalized utterances, sentence frames and heads. American psychologist G. Miller(1956) points out the capacity of short-term memory is about 7 ± 2 information units. After that, Atkinson-Shiffrin(1968) suggested chunks should be perceived as a unit. Chunking allows for large amounts of information to be held in memory. Therefore, the author tries to apply lexical approach to primary school students? vocabulary learning to find out the following three questions: 1) Does applying lexical approach to vocabulary teaching in primary school have some positive effects on students? vocabulary retention? 2) Is lexical approach beneficial for primary school students? use of vocabulary? 3) Can the use of lexical approach in vocabulary teaching improve primary school students? English comprehensive ability?To answer the questions above, the author chose two classes(class 1 and class 2) of Grade 6 from Qinquan School in Yumen. Class 1 was regarded as experimental group(EG), while Class 2 was selected as control group(CG). There were 23 students in each group. During the experiment, lexical approach was adopted in EG to teach vocabulary, but the author taught vocabulary in CG in a tradition way. Pre-test and post-test were all carried out in both EG and CG. The author used SPSS 17.0 to collect and analyze the data.With the analysis of data, the conclusion is shown as follow s: According to the data of pre-test, students didn?t grasp the words from unit one firmly and memorizing vocabulary was a tough task for primary school students. After applying lexical approach into vocabulary teaching, students did a much better job of vocabulary writing, which verifies the effect of lexical approach on vocabulary teaching. Meanwhile, if students memorize chunk as a whole, it will be easier for them to extract these chunks and use them in answering questions correctly. It improves students? ability of expressing with correct words and phrases. However, because of the limitation of time, the experiment was only carried for 45 days. The improvement of comprehensive English ability is not so obvious.At last, the thesis tentatively points out that the English teachers should cultivate students? awareness of lexical chunks and self-directed learning ability, help students accumulate lexical chunks with frequency and explore the effective teaching pattern and method actively.