Application Research Of The Lexical Approach In English Vocabulary Teaching For Non-english Majors In College

Vocabulary plays an important role in language acquisition and language teaching.Vocabulary teaching is of critical importance to language teaching in college.However,the result of vocabulary teaching in colledge is not as good as people had thought.Michael Lewis put forward a meaningful teaching method and a new thought in his famous book?The Lexical Approach?which published in 1993.The core theory is that language consists of grammaticalised lexis,not lexicalized grammar.It needs to note that the“??”refers to lexical chunks rather than vocabulary we often called in theory.In recent years,some studies have shown that 90 percent of natural discourses are realized by lexical chunks.Lexical chunks have relatively fixed form and function and it is easy to store and to draw from brain.Therefore,to master a large number of lexical chunks is helpful to improve learners'language accuracy.Lexical chunks cognition is essential to the acquisition of lexical chunks. Lewis(1993) pointed that language teachers should be capable of identifying lexical chunks from text and should help students master this skill. Therefore, the author wants to confirm whether students have the ability of identifying lexical chunks. In addition, students have trouble in pruducing correct and authentic language due to paying too much more attention to grammar rules and ignoring lexical phrases in communication. Writing, as one of the most important ways of language output, is an important part in English teaching of college, however, it is also widely considered to be a barricade in English teaching. Therefore, how to improve non-English major students' writing has become a hot issue.The author selects 82 freshmen who come from QiuShi College of GuiZhou Normal University, of whom 42 major in economy and management and 40 major in mathematics. In the experiment, they were divided into the experimental class and the control class at random. The experimental class is given to the lexical approach while the control class uses traditional teaching methods on the condition of two groups have the same English lever. In this paper, the author takes three questions as the research questions:1) whether students have the ability of lexical chunks identification; 2)whether lexical approach can help students produce correct and authentic language; 3)whether lexical approach can improve students writing ability. After the experiment, the author uses SPSS13.0 as measuring tool to analyze data collected in the experiment. The result shows that the experimental class gets higher grades compared with the control class in lexical chunks identification, translation and writing.As a new research method, the lexical approach provides a good way for English vocabulary teaching. The research, to some extent, can prove that the lexical approach is beneficial to students' vocabulary learning.