The Application Of Lexical Chunk Approach To The Teaching Of English Vocabulary For Year-one In High School

Vocabulary is one of the three elements in English language. It plays a significant role in language learning. However, the current circumstance of vocabulary learning is not positive as we though. For high school students, vocabulary learning is an obsessional problem. And at the same time, teachers also face many difficulties, how can they help students to understand the vocabulary and to use them correctly?After recognize the current situation of the class 2 in No.104 Regiment Middle School in Urumqi, based on the effect of chunking on memory, the language acquisition theory and the co-selection theory, this research conducted the teaching experiment to explore the effects of the lexical chunk approach in the enhancement of high school students’ vocabulary scores. According to this, it focused on providing instructional suggestions for high school English vocabulary teaching, and try to improve it.The research objects were Class 2 and 3, year-one students of No.104 Regiment Middle School in Urumqi. During the teaching process, Class 2 was taught with the lexical chunk approach, and Class 3 was taught with normal teaching method. After 12-week teaching meddle, the researcher recognized that the lexical chunk approach could improve students’ vocabulary scores from their understanding, selection, and application of vocabulary. The significance levels were p < 0.05.The major findings were provided as follows: lexical chunk approach could help year-1 students of high school to improve their English vocabulary; it could also help the students perform better in understanding, selecting, and applying words, and helped them to express their ideas in a more logical way.All these results had some implications on English vocabulary teaching in the first grade of high school:(1) teachers should put the lexical chunk approach into daily teaching;(2) teachers should nurture students’ ideal habit to learn vocabulary by depending on the language acquisition theory and the co-selection theory, then improve students’ proficiency of vocabulary learning;(3) teachers should transform teaching notions, and apply educational theories to practice continually.