An Empirical Study Of Teaching Lexical Chunks For College English Listening

English plays a key role in the globalization of communications,politics, economies, and cultures worldwide. Listening, one of the four basic language skills of English(listening,speaking, reading and writing), is the foundation of verbal communication. Nowadays, being a component of college English teaching, listening teaching has rightfully grown in importance.According to the previous teaching practices in college and questionnaire survey on current college students' listening learning status,the author finds two problems in teaching listening in college: First,students are weak in listening and it's difficult to promote their listening ability. Due to insufficient vocabulary and mispronunciation, their limited lexical extraction ability hinders the listening ability to improve. Second,students show little enthusiasm to listen. The traditional test-oriented listening teaching method is boring and results in the loss of the students'initiative. This study proposes to promote students' listening ability by changing traditional listening teaching mode and promoting their lexical extraction ability to enhance students' motivation to listen and learn.Beginning from related theoretical studies of listening and the lexical approach, the author introduces lexical chunks as the basic language unit and proposes a teaching model called the LCBL Teaching Model.(Lexical Chunks-Based Listening Teaching Model).The LCBL Teaching Model consists of four phases: experiencing input, acquiring chunks, consolidating intake, and prompting output.Experiencing input refers to creating context, activating related background knowledge, and acquiring comprehensive input in authentic contexts.Acquiring chunks refers to identifying and classifying lexical chunks from listening input, and to grasping meaning and common usage of important collected lexical chunks. Consolidating intake refers to listening input and speech training in all sorts of ways. They help to take in new lexical chunks and cultivate phonological competence. Prompting output refers to adopting various teaching activities, especially speaking related, to offer students more opportunities to use lexical chunks in interactive language communication.To verify the effectiveness of the LCBL Teaching Model, the experiment is carried out among 38 non-English major students in one class from ** University which lasts for seven weeks. The author uses research methods as the CET-4 listening tests, lexical chunks tests and questionnaires. Through data analysis, the results are as follows:(1)Students' listening abilities are promoted.(2)Students' interests in listening are increased.The findings above suggest that the LCBL Teaching Model has positive effects on improving students' listening ability and learning motivation in English listening. And the model is of reference and directive significance for English listening teaching in college. Lastly, time limited,the research has some limitations including short experimental time, the small size of samples, etc. The author will attempt to overcome these limitations in future research.