Experimental Research On The Effects Of Lexical Approach On Primary School Students' Vocabulary Learning

Lexical Approach has been paid more and more attention by linguists in recent years.Michael Lewis,a famous contemporary linguist,first proposed Lexical Approach in 1993.Scholars at home and abroad have a wide range of empirical research.However,a large number of previous studies related to lexical chunks have focused on college students and have little research on primary school students who have just studied English.And the primary stage is the beginning of the students to learn English,the focus on the Lexical Approach of this group will undoubtedly have a very important reference to the study of English teaching in primary school.This study employs the theory of lexical approach and information processing as theoretical framework to research the impact of lexical approach upon primary school students' English vocabulary learning.Lexical approach emphasizes the key point of English teaching should be collocations,institutionalized utterances,sentence frames and heads.American psychologist G Miller(1956)points out the capacity of short-term memory is about 7 ± 2 information units.Therefore,the purpose of this research is to propose three research questions:(1)Does application of lexical approach have some positive effects on students' vocabulary retention?(2)Is application of lexical approach beneficial for primary school students' use of vocabulary?(3)Can application of lexical approach enhance students' lexical chunk awareness?To answer the questions above,the author chose two classes(class 2 and class 3)of Grade 6 from Nanwu Primary School in Guangzhou.Class 2 was regarded as experimental group(EG),while Class 3 was selected as control group(CG).There were 45 students in each group.During the experiment,lexical approach was adopted in EG to teach vocabulary,but the author taught vocabulary in CG in a tradition way.Pre-test and post-test were all carried out in both EG and CG.The author used SPSS 22.0 to collect and analyze the data.Through the Independent Samples T-test,the experimental group and the control group had significant differences in the two vocabulary tests.It proves the validity of memorizing vocabulary of primary school pupils by lexical approach,and the students can extract the vocabulary as a whole,and apply them correctly to the task of cloze,and improve the students' ability to use vocabulary correctly.From the questionnaire results,we can see that the class students' lexical chunk awareness in English learning has improved markedly after the experiment.Finally,based on the experimental process and research results,the author proposes the following three suggestions on how to better the future research.Firstly,the study time should be appropriately extended to ensure the reliability of the experiment,and secondly,the operation should be applied to other grades in other schools to verify whether it plays the same role;thirdly,the questionnaire should be further refined on the basis of predecessors to specific disciplines to ensure its accuracy.