The Application Of The Lexical Chunks To English Reading Teaching In Senior High School

Teaching English reading in senior high school is one of the most important parts in English teaching in our country. Setting teaching objectives is accordance with the requirements of the new curriculum standard. However, there are some gaps between the students' reading ability and the requirements of the new curriculum standard. Therefore, how to cultivate the students' reading ability has been a buzzword in foreign language teaching. The lexical chunk is a new theory of foreign language teaching in recent years. It combines the characteristics of structural approach and communicative approach. It's been proved that lexical chunks have more advantages than other teaching methods in language skills, such as listening, speaking, reading and writing.This research is based on the lexical chunks, aiming to investigate the feasibility and validity of lexical chunks used in teaching English reading in senior high school. In doing the experiment, the author selects two parallel classes in Grade Two of Pingdong Middle School in Fuzhou, and 102 students act as subjects. The whole experiment was carried out for 12 weeks. One class is the experimental class in which the lexical chunk theory is used in teaching English reading, and the other is the controlled class in which the traditional way is used in teaching English reading. All the data collected from the research were processed with the SPSS.16.0 and the Excel for analyses and discussions.The findings of the research are as follows. Firstly, the application of lexical chunks to the teaching of English reading helps to improve the students' reading ability. The students in the experimental class make more progress than those in the controlled class. Secondly, the application of lexical chunks to teaching English reading helps to arouse the students' interest and motivate the students' reading enthusiasm. Most of the students in the experimental class began to adopt a positive attitude to do reading and greatly change their reading attitudes, methods and strategies. Thirdly, the application of lexical chunks to teaching English reading has a different influence on different levels of the students' reading ability. It has more obvious positive influence on better students, while it has opposite result on weak students. Lastly, in practical reading teaching, it's necessary to cultivate the students' awareness of lexical chunks and improve the students' sensitivity of lexical chunks. The students are able to learn the lexical chunks in the context of reading, and use the lexical chunks to analyze and understand the reading passages. Then, they memorize and accumulate the lexical chunks again in the process of retelling the reading passages.