A Study On The Effects Of Explicit And Implicit Teaching On The Acquisition Of Lexical Chunks For English Majors

In recent years,the Explicit and Implicit teaching have gradually become one of the most heated research topics in the field of Second Language Teaching and Second Language Acquisition both abroad and at home.Both domestic and foreign researches have shown that the Explicit and Implicit teaching can efficiently enhance the development of the learners' second language acquisition.However,most studies on the Explicit and Implicit teaching have originally concentrated on the grammatical,lexical and pragmatic aspects,while the lexical approach is scarcely explored.Therefore,this study,pioneeringly taking lexical chunks which is an essential feature of the lexical approach as its target form,proposes to explore the effects of the Explicit and Implicit teaching on the acquisition of lexical chunks for English majors from the perspective of the identification and production.The research is designed in quantitative way.Two English major classes with the same English proficiency level were chosen from College of Foreign Languages,Northeast Forestry University as the research participants,with Class One as the experimental group,and Class Two as the control group.Specifically speaking,two questions will be endeavored to solve in the thesis:(1)Does the integration of Explicit teaching and Implicit teaching,or does the Implicit teaching alone facilitate the identification and production of lexical chunks for English majors?(2)Whether the integration of Explicit teaching and Implicit teaching is more effective than Implicit teaching alone concerning the identification and production of lexical chunks for English majors? First of all,the pre-test of the identification and production of lexical chunks was administrated in the experimental group and the control group.Then a 14-week-long integration of Explicit teaching and Implicit teaching on lexical chunks was implemented among the experimental group.At the same time,a 14-week-long Implicit teaching alone on lexical chunks was carried out among the control group.After the completion of teaching tasks,the post-test of the identification and production of lexical chunks was conducted between the experimental group and the control group.After the collection of research data,the number of the lexical chunks in the pre-test and post-test was collected with the help of the Britain National Corpus and the opinions of professors in English major department and all the collected data were analyzed in SPSS 19.0.The research results showed that:(1)the integration of Explicit teaching and Implicit teaching and the Implicit teaching alone were significantly facilitative of English majors' identification and production of lexical chunks in the Advanced English class;(2)the integration of Explicit teaching and Implicit teaching was not significantly facilitative of English majors' identification and production of lexical chunks in the Advanced English class compared with the Implicit teaching alone.The research results of this study have enriched the empirical researches of the Explicit and Implicit teaching in the field of lexical chunks and provided new perspectives for the teaching of Advanced English for English majors,which plays a significant role in raising English majors' awareness about the use of lexical chunks and ability to actually use it as well as further promoting the overall listening,speaking,reading and writing proficiency of English majors.