An Empirical Study Of The Effects Of Lexical Chunk Approach On Lexical Competence Of Senior High School Students

Vocabulary is an essential building block of language.However,many language learners,especially high school students feel that vocabulary learning is quite difficult.They have paid much attention and a lot of effort on vocabulary learning but with little good result.The lack of adequate vocabularies is the main obstacle on the road of improving their lexical competence and English proficiency.Lexical Chunk Approach is a new kind of vocabulary teaching method,which is based on Chunking Theory,Comprehensible Input Hypothesis and the Affective Filter Hypothesis.Actually,this teaching method can improve the speed and efficiency of processing information greatly.This study conducts an experiment by introducing Lexical Chunk Approach in English vocabulary teaching to survey the effect of it on senior high school students' lexical competence.At the same time,the experiment is aimed at answering the following two questions:(1)What effects can lexical chunk approach make on senior high school students' receptive lexical competence?(2)What effects can lexical chunk approach make on senior high school students' productive lexical competence?In the experiment,40 students of two classes in the second year of Xiangfang Senior High School respectively are chosen as the studying subjects for about four months.One class is the experiment class,in which lexical chunk approach is employed,while the other one is the control class that utilizes the traditional teaching method.In terms of the testing methods,receptive vocabulary level test,controlled productive vocabulary level test and free productive level test are all utilized.The data are analyzed with the help of RANGE proposed by Nation and the software SPSS19.0.All of them prove that there is an obvious development of students' receptive lexical competence and productive lexical competence.As for the improvement of productive lexical competence,greater changes take place in their lexical size and lexical variation than in their lexical sophistication and lexical density.All in all,lexical chunk approach makes a difference to the improvement of students' lexical competence.In fact,Lexical Chunk Approach not only provides empirical basis for vocabulary teaching but also broadens the application and research of English language teaching.In addition,the study hopes to have some reference value to English vocabulary teaching in senior high schools.