An Empirical Study Of English Reading Teaching Based On Lexical Chunks Theory In Senior High School

Reading comprehension has become the most thorny problem in senior high school students.So,how to improve students' reading ability is the teachers' biggest concern.So far,some researches about lexical chunks theory in English listening,writing and translation have been done by scholars at home and abroad.However,there is few studies of such kind in English reading comprehension in senior high schools.Lexical chunks have broken the scope of words and collocations in the traditional sense and expanded to the sentences and even to the discourses.It is beneficial to the development of the discourse comprehension.So,it is obvious that the theory of lexical chunks plays an important role in reading comprehension teaching and it can change the traditional reading teaching method---Grammar Translation Method.This paper studies two main questions:(1)Whether the application of the lexical chunks theory can improve senior high school students' ability in distinguishing the lexical chunks during reading;(2)Whether the application of the lexical chunks theory can improve students' reading ability in senior high school English reading teaching.This paper uses the empirical study to explore the feasibility and effectiveness of the application of lexical chunks theory to English reading teaching in senior high schools.The author conducts nearly four months' experiment with as subjects of the study two parallel classes students from Grade 1 of a senior middle school in a certain county in Xuancheng city,Anhui province.Each class has 50 people,with Class 1 as the experimental class,Class 2 as controlled class.The experimental class adopts the lexical chunks teaching method,the controlled class the traditional teaching method.Respectively,the author gives students in two classes two questionnaires and reading tests at the beginning and the end of the semester.Then the results of two questionnaires have been analyzed and contrasted,and the collected data of thereading tests calculated,analyzed with SPSS.As the conclusion shows,the post-test scores in experiment class are higher than those of the controlled class as a whole.It proves that the application of lexical chunks theory can improve the students' ability in distinguishing the lexical chunks while reading and their reading ability in senior high school.This paper is divided into five chapters.The first chapter is introduction,which describes the research background,questions,purposes and significance and the paper structure.The second chapter is the literature review,it consists of the definition,classification,functions and characteristics of lexical chunks,as well as the reading theory.And it also gives the overview of the researches of the application of lexical chunks theory to English reading teaching at home and abroad.The third chapter is about the surveys and the experimental research,including the research plan,subjects,hypothesis,tools and process.The fourth chapter discusses the results of the study,includes the results of the questionnaires and reading tests data.The fifth chapter is conclusion,summarizing the results of the study and pointing out its enlightenment,limitations and prospects.