An Empirical Study Of The Application Of Lexical Chunks To English Vocabulary Teaching In Rural Junior Middle Schools

The thesis is an empirical study of the application of lexical chunks to English vocabulary teaching in rural junior middle schools. Vocabulary teaching plays a crucial role in a language teaching, which makes much difference in the process of students’ language acquisition. As for vocabulary teaching, some teachers in junior middle schools usually ignore the characteristics of vocabulary, and adopt some traditional and improper ways to guide their teaching. Besides, they pay little attention to training students’ vocabulary learning strategy, which makes students memorize vocabulary mechanically. The new criterion of English course for junior middle schools makes more demands on vocabulary teaching. It requires teachers to reconsider their teaching approaches and teaching methods of English vocabulary. The researcher selects the research topic based on the following reasons. Firstly, many researches on lexical chunks are done from the aspect of theory, related empirical studies are insufficient. The empirical study in this thesis is meaningful to testify some previous research achievements in the aspect of practice. Secondly, ahead of this research thesis, students in rural junior middle schools play a very small part in terms of research subjects. In this thesis, students from two classes in a rural junior middle school are served as research subjects which is meaningful to enrich research subjects.Under the guidance of the theory of constructivism and the input hypothesis, the research attempts to answer these three research questions:(1) What are the influences of lexical chunks teaching on students’ interest and confidence towards lexical chunks learning and degree of using lexical chunks?(2) What are the influences of lexical chunks teaching on students’ abilities of lexical chunks acquisition?(3) What are the influences of lexical chunks teaching on students’ vocabulary level?In the research, questionnaires, comprehensive English vocabulary tests and classroom observation were served as research instruments. Reliability and validity of the questionnaire were analyzed in the control of SPSS 23.0. Independent samples test and paired samples test in the control of SPSS 23.0 were adopted in the questionnaires. This experiment also applied unary linear regression equation in order to find out the relationship between the frequency of using lexical chunks and writing scores. Independent samples test and paired samples test in the control of SPSS 23.0 were adopted in the writing scores and total scores of comprehensive English vocabulary tests.The findings from the empirical research can be summarized as followings:First, lexical chunks teaching can improve students’ interest and confidence towards lexical chunks learning and degree of using lexical chunks.Second, lexical chunks teaching can enhance students’ abilities of lexical chunks acquisition more efficiently than traditional vocabulary teaching.Third, lexical chunks teaching can promote students’ vocabulary level more obviously than traditional vocabulary teaching.From the findings, we can conclude that lexical chunks teaching can help students master and apply vocabulary more efficiently than traditional English vocabulary teaching. The application of lexical chunks to English vocabulary teaching in rural junior middle schools is viable.For the sake of limitation of time and space, the research has two main shortcomings. Firstly, 70 students in total as samples are not enough to show the learning situation of all junior middle students. The results of the research may not be typical. Secondly, the experiment period is relatively short. For further study, more samples and longer time will make the research more scientific. Oral test may be a supplemental research instrument for further study.