The Application Of The Theory Of Lexical Chunks To English Teaching At Senior High Schools

It goes without saying that vocabulary is of fundamental significance to language learning. In daily teaching practices, both teachers and students put great emphasis on vocabulary and invest considerable time and energy in it. However, despite many strenuous efforts, there seems to be no substantial improvement in students’comprehensive language competence. As is often the case, students spend a lot of time memorizing new words but still feel at a loss when they need to produce language, falling into the predicament where they fail to employ the words in their repertoires accurately and properly at every attempt.The recent findings of corpus linguistics reveal that there exist a massive number of fixed or semi-fixed formulaic sequences in the natural language, which are composed of two or more words, stored in memory as a whole, and retrieved directly at the time of use without undergoing the grammatical analysis. The crucial value of multi-word units defined as lexical chunks to the second language acquisition has drawn wide attention from many linguists, among whom is Michael Lewis. He points out that lexical chunks can remarkably help save efforts in language processing, avoid the negative transfer of the mother language and achieve a balance between accuracy and fluency, as a result of which they are the most desirable language teaching and learning units. He advocates taking lexical chunks as the core of language teaching and promoting language users’language competence and integrated skills under the training of lexical chunks instructions.The theory of lexical chunks taking the research results of Michael Lewis as the core casts some light on addressing the inefficiency and ineffectiveness of the current English teaching in senior high schools. Under the guidance of the theory of lexical chunks, this thesis aims to explore the practice and effect of applying lexical chunks teaching methods to EFL teaching in senior high schools. The thesis consists of five chapters:Introduction, Literature Review, Application of the Theory of Lexical Chunks in high-school English teaching, Methodology and Conclusion. Chapter One explains the deficiency of current vocabulary teaching in high schools, the necessity of carrying out this study and the structure of this thesis. Chapter Two presents the theoretical foundations, the definitions, the classifications and the functions of lexical chunks and relevant studies at home and abroad. Besides, it probes into the core concepts and teaching principles of the theory of lexical chunks. Chapter Three displays the feasibility of incorporating lexical chunks instructions into the teaching practices of Advance with English. Chapter Four offers a detailed depiction of the lexical teaching experiment, including its purpose, subjects, materials, procedure, results and discussion. By contrasting and analyzing the statistics collected from the control group and the experimental group, the author finds that lexical chunks instructions do have a positive impact on improving learners’performance in learning English and are thus practical and beneficial. The findings of this study are concluded and suggestions on future researches are given in the last chapter.