| The proposition of the Belt and Road initiative brings great opportunities to EFL education,and presents higher demands on the cultivation of foreign language talents.Therefore,CET Committee made a partial adjustment to the listening test of CET-4 in2016.Short dialogues and dictation were canceled.The eight short dialogues were replaced by three news items.News broadcast,once appeared in TEM-4,became a test style in CET-4.It is a great challenge for non-English majors who rarely listen to English news.As a university teacher,the author finds that students have a poor performance in the news items due to the following reasons: first,the speed of English news is fast;second,there are more professional vocabulary;third,students are unfamiliar to background of news;fourth,students have few storage of news lexical chunks in their mind.Michael Lewis,who proposed lexical approach,regarded lexical chunks as the focus of English learning and stated that lexical chunks are grammaticalized lexis,rather than lexicalized grammar(Lewis,1993).Lexical chunks are stored as a whole in our mind,and can be extracted directly when necessary.With more lexical chunks stored in mind,students can speed up language processing,promote accuracy and fluency of language production.The author tries to introduce lexical approach to English news listening teaching,aiming to explore the effect of the lexical approach on the non-English majors' English news listening proficiency and provide statistical evidence and pedagogical implications for college English news listening class.The research questions are as follows:1.Does the lexical approach facilitate students' lexical chunk competence?2.Does the lexical approach facilitate students' news listening proficiency?3.Are there any correlation between students' lexical chunk competence and their news listening proficiency?The subjects selected in this study were 126 freshmen from six natural classes in Shanxi Agricultural University.At the beginning of the semester,the author assigned three classes,with 64 students,to be experimental group(EG),while the other threeclasses of 62 are assigned to be control group(CG).The EG adopts lexical approach,while the CG adopts the traditional teaching method,that is T plays news item – Ss choose the answer – T checks answers,and explains the gist of news item and key language points when necessary.The experiment lasts for 16 weeks.Before the experiment,the author used AntConc software to sort out high-frequency news lexical chunks from newspaper section in the BNC Baby(abbreviation for British National Corpus).After that,the author and the other two colleagues checked and removed those that had no particular use or repeated for more than twice.These lexical chunks were then handed out to students in the EG and they were required to memorize these chunks.The present study employed both quantitative research and qualitative research in order to ensure the authenticity and validity of the experimental results,which included teaching experiment and semi-structured interview.The major findings of this study are as follows:1.There's a significant difference in chunk competence between students who receive different teaching mode.EG performed better in lexical chunk test.The lexical approach has a positive effect on students' chunk competence.2.The lexical approach has a positive effect on the improvement of students' listening proficiency,especially news listening proficiency.EG has a better performance in the post-test.Besides,students in the EG have more confidence and feel more familiar with news,especially social news.3.There exists a close correlation between students' lexical chunk competence and their news listening proficiency.Students who had stored more lexical chunks can understand the news items better.This study provides a new teaching thought and useful enlightenment for the teaching of college English news listening. |
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