The Application Of Lexical Chunks On English Listening Teaching And Learning In Senior High School—An Action Research

Listening, as one of the important ways for language input, is the basis of developing other language skills. Therefore, listening plays a vital role in English learning. New English Curriculum Standards puts emphasis and importance on the cultivation of students’ listening comprehension ability. However, most English teachers adopt testing students’ listening comprehension ability as the exclusive teaching method. They always utilize the activities or exercises designed in textbook to test students’ listening comprehension ability but ignore the training of students’ listening comprehension skills. As a result, students lack of instructions on listening comprehension strategies and the formation of listening comprehension habits so that their listening comprehension ability is at a low level. As we know that memory, especially short-term memory, plays a crucial role in listening comprehension process, while the capacity of short-term memory is limited.Therefore, students have to master the strategy of combining massive information into several chunks. Fortunately, lexical chunks are stored as several words or a sentence so that to expand the capacity of short-term memory and to improve the efficiency of listening comprehension. In view of the facts, this study attempts to make an action research focusing on applying lexical chunks to listening teaching and learning for sophomores in senior high school with the purpose of improving their listening comprehension ability.The 51 students in this study are sophomores from one of the senior high schools in Shangrao.Research tools used in this study are two tests, two questionnaires, interviews and teaching blogs.The study aims to address the following two questions:(1) What’s the effect of applying lexical chunks to English listening teaching and learning on students’ listening habit?(2) What’s the effect of applying lexical chunks to English listening teaching and learning on students’ listening comprehension ability?The results show that:(1) Applying lexical chunks to English listening teaching and learning can help most of the students form good listening habits, such as cultivating the consciousness of lexical chunks, receiving information in the unit of lexical chunks and comprehending long sentence with the help of lexical chunks in the process of listening.(2) After collecting and analyzing the data of pre-test and post-test, the results show that lexical chunks-based English listening teaching andlearning method can improve students’ listening comprehension ability.This thesis is divided into five chapters. Chapter one, introduction, describes the background of the study, the purpose and the significance of the study as well as the layout of the study. Chapter two, literature review, deals with theories related to lexical chunks, the psychological process of listening, the factors affecting listening comprehension and the relevant researches on lexical chunks at home and abroad. Chapter three, research design, illustrates research questions, research subjects,research instruments and action research procedures. Chapter four presents the implementations of action research and data analysis. Chapter five, conclusion, displays major findings of the research and pedagogic implications. Moreover, limitations and suggestions for further research are also offered.