An Action Research On The Enhancement Of Junior High School Students' English Reading Competence Through Lexical Chunks Based Teaching

Lexis is the fundamental basis and one of the three elements in language. It also is the foundation stone of listening, speaking, reading and writing. Reading is a very important skill in language acquisition. In reading, sufficient vocabularies, which are the basic requirement, benefit the language input; meanwhile a great deal of reading also can expand the quantity of vocabulary. However, many Junior High School students are blocked by vocabularies in reading passages which makes them not want to read more. Students often memorize the vocabularies isolatedly, which leads them to express their ideas with the simple words, phrases and sentences instead of flexible comprehensive using. As a result, students spent lots of time in remembering the words and studying grammatical rules. This affects the students' understanding in reading comprehension and makes their efforts in language input produce little effect.In order to help the learners with language acquisition by using more effective lexical learning method, scholars did a lot of researches on vocabulary teaching and learning. Until 1980 s, corpora linguists discovered that large quantities of fixed or semi-fixed phrases and sentence structures, which are called prefabricated expressions of lexical chunks, exist in human language. It is found that lexical chunks can be stored in human's brain as stocks of words and used as a whole. According to these researches, lexical chunks can release learners' memorizing burden, accelerate the speed of language processing and promote the language acquisition. Lexical chunks based teaching is developed from the lexical approach which is based on the theory of Lewis “language consists of grammatical lexis — not lexicalized grammar”.In Author's more than 10 years' English teaching career, she found that there were a lot of problems and bad habits(e.g. lack of vocabularies, confused grammar rules, frustrated in English class, unconfident in English learning and so on) in Junior High School students' vocabulary learning which led them to a lower learning level and affected them to misunderstand the English reading comprehension. As reading skill plays a very important role in Junior High School's English learning, students need to master sufficient vocabularies to help them do well in the reading comprehension and improve their English proficiency. In this paper, author wants to help the Junior High School students improve their input ability in English language acquisition through the interaction of lexical chunks and reading teaching.In this thesis, author aims to apply the lexical chunks based teaching in English reading class, using the researches on lexical chunks and reading teaching abroad and domestic for reference. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of applying lexical chunks based teaching in reading class, author carried out a fourteen-week action research. In the action research, forty Junior High School students from Grade Nine were chosen to participate. Data, which was typed into computer and analyzed with SPSS 19.0, was collected from the pre-test before the action research, the mid-test and the post-test during the action research. Pre-questionnaire and post-questionnaire were conducted among all the students involved. There was an interview in the middle of the action research as well as one after the research.The analytical results prove that:1) The lexical chunks based teaching can help Junior High School students understand the reading material easily.2) The teaching based on lexical chunks is more helpful to improve Junior High School students' English reading competence.