A Study On The Application Of Lexical Approach In Elementary School English Teaching

The lexical approach as a vocabulary teaching strategy has been implemented in many classes with the purpose of enhancing vocabulary instruction and students' retainment.A key difference in this approach,as compared to other strategies,is the“chunking” approach,i.e.the focus of instruction is on “lexical chunks” or phrases,rather than individual words.This study aims to investigate the implementation of the lexical approach in elementary school English teaching in answering the following two questions: 1)What is the current situation of the application of the lexical approach in elementary school English teaching? 2)What are the benefits of the lexical approach in terms of facilitating elementary school students' acquisition of English?In order to collect data to answer these questions,three instruments of data collection,both quantitatively and qualitatively,are carried out: a questionnaire,classroom observation,pre-and post-test.The designed questionnaire is based on the main principles of the lexical approach and Lian Haiyan's questionnaire.It covers five dimensions: language content,language skill,teaching principles,teaching methods and grammar errors.The classroom observation focuses on elementary school English teachers' teaching process and two English classes(Class 1 and Class 2)are conducted to find out the existing problems during the implementation of the lexical approach.In order to answer the second research question,a short-term experiment of twelve-week long is conducted to apply the lexical approach in EC and traditional teaching methods in CC with pre-and post-test results.The measuring instruments for pre-and post-test are students' mid-term and final-term examination paper.The datacollected from the study are analyzed by SPSS.22 and major findings are summarized as follows:First,most Chinese elementary school English teachers show an affirmative attitude towards the lexical approach and they have indeed applied the approach into real English teaching.However,some of the teachers fail to understand the teaching strategies and ways of dealing with grammar errors in the lexical approach.In addition,the general situation about the application of five dimensions manifests that there are some deficiency in the implementation of the lexical approach.And there still exist the problems on teachers' neglect of collocation relationship,teaching process,communication ability,the exploration stage of chunks as well as situation or con-text.Besides,teachers' awareness of the exploration of chunks resources is not high.Second,although the comparison of the whole scores between EC and CC indicates that positive effect on elementary school students' acquisition of English is not so obvious,the mean score of EC is 2 higher than CC.There is a tendency that EC begins to perform better than control group.If given more time for EC,students in EC are convinced to do a better job.Some implications attained from this study are as follows: On one hand,teachers should cultivate students' competence of self-learning of lexical chunks.On the other hand,teachers should explore the effective teaching pattern in order to improve competence of chunks teaching.