An Empirical Study Of Vocabulary Teaching In Senior High School Based On Lexical Chunk Approach

Vocabulary plays an important role in English language teaching. However, vocabulary teaching does not cause attention of teachers and students in current senior high school vocabulary teaching. Vocabulary teaching out of context and lacking sufficient language input are the main causes of students’ collocation errors. Therefore, an effective vocabulary teaching method is the key to resolving the problem.According to Krashen’s input hypothesis, second language acquisition theory and Swain’s output hypothesis, the researcher puts forward two questions: the first one is that what’s the senior high school students’ attitude towards vocabulary teaching? The second one is that what’s the effect of lexical chunk approach in improving students’ vocabulary learning? An empirical study of vocabulary teaching in senior high school based on lexical chunk approach is carried out. In order to testify these two discussion questions, 86 students of two classes in Liaoning Province Shiyan High School of Grade two are chosen as the experimental subjects, a random set of experimental class and control class, the experiment lasts for three months. Before the experiment, these two classes take a pre-questionnaire and a pre-test. In the experiment, vocabulary teaching method based on lexical chunk approach is adopted in the experimental class, while the traditional vocabulary teaching method is adopted in the control class. At the end of the experiment, two classes again receive the posttest and only the experimental class receives a post-questionnaire. The experimental data are collected and analyzed with SPSS 22. The results show that the scores of the experimental class is significantly higher than the control class, students of the experimental class express interest in vocabulary learning get improved. That is to say, lexical chunk approach plays a positive role in vocabulary teaching in senior high school.Therefore, the researcher thinks that English teachers should be fully aware of the positive role of lexical chunk approach in English vocabulary teaching, and employ it to vocabulary teaching so as to reduce vocabulary learning burden and improve the effect of vocabulary learning.