An Empirical Study On Lewis’ Lexical Approach In Senior High School’s English Vocabulary Teaching

Vocabulary, as an indispensable part of language, plays an essential role in language learning, especially for Chinese learners, taking English as their foreign language, Due to their lack of natural English language context, foreign language learners, mostly, exposed themselves to authentic language materials to learn English. Thus, if they intend to learn English well, learning vocabulary is of significance. However, the current situation of English vocabulary teaching and learning in China has turned out to be unsatisfactory, especially in senior high school. Under great pressure of college entrance examination, students spare no effort to memorize vocabulary on the basic of traditional vocabulary teaching, and learning methods. Once they find the words they strive to remember can not be retrieved or even they don’t know how to use it in test, there will be negative influence on their interest and confidence. Lots of students even completely memorize vocabulary on the glossary in textbooks or on alphabetical senior high school English vocabulary pocketbooks, as a result, the words they just remembered turn out to be forgotten soon. Due to their scores in English tests can not be increased, some of them gradually give up learning English, which leads to seriously unbalance among subjects and ultimately, fail to be admitted to their ideal university. Therefore, it is crucial to help senior high school students find effective methods of vocabulary learning so that they can apply the words they have learnt and build up their confidence of English learning.Considering the importance of vocabulary teaching and learning and its bad situation in senior high school English teaching, the author makes up her mind to introduce the Lexical Approach put forward by Michael Lewis into English vocabulary teaching and learning in senior high school. In Implementing the Lexical Approach(1997) Lewis defines the Lexical Approach that ‘language consists not of traditional grammar and vocabulary but often of multi-word prefabricated chunks.’ The fundamental difference between Lewis’ Lexical Approach and traditional vocabulary teaching methods lies in different views on ‘vocabulary’. He believes that vocabulary not merely refers to individual words, also includes word combinations that he calls ‘multi-word prefabricated chunks’; whereas in the view of traditional vocabulary teaching methods, vocabulary is a stock of single words with fixed meanings. In Lewis’ Lexical Approach, lexis is the core of language and lexical chunk is the core of the approach. Teachers using the approach do not need to analyze language, and all teaching activities aim at managing to draw learners’ attention to as larger chunks as possible through presenting naturally occurring language materials. In the approach, learning and memorizing lexical chunks definitely improve learners’ vocabulary learning efficiency and ability. Meanwhile, learners processing language through lexical chunks will be more effective than linking several irrelative single words together to make up language, moreover, in this way, the language they produce proves to be more authentic and correct.In this thesis, Lewis’ Lexical Approach is used in practice. The author hopes to find out its advantages in helping senior high school’s students learning vocabulary. In order to testify that this approach can help students improve their vocabulary learning efficiency and increase their interests and confidence in learning English, she conducts the teaching experiment in the Senior High School Attached to Guizhou Normal University for three months.The subjects are from class 22 grade 2(Control Class) and class 24 grade 2(Experimental Class). The Lexical Approach is introduced to Experimental Class, whereas traditional vocabulary methods are applied to Control Class. At the end of the experiment, the results of the pre-test and post-test carried out in both classes are analyzed in comparative way. And then, a questionnaire is designed to get the feedback of subjects in Experimental Class.Finally, through data analysis of the experimental results, the author demonstrates that Lewis’ Lexical Approach improves not only senior high school students’ vocabulary learning effect, but also their comprehensive ability of using English. Meanwhile, the analysis results of the questionnaire also indicate that most of students in Experimental Class are optimistic about the approach, which successfully stimulates students’ interest in learning English. Because the words they’ve learnt are taken into practice, their sense of achievement is also enhanced. Admittedly, this research result has a few limitations, such as the limited practice teaching time, the monotonous of question types and so on. Thus, the author expects that more English teachers will conduct the empirical study on Lewis’ Lexical Approach to confirm its feasibility and then offer effective vocabulary learning methods to various stages of English learners.