An Empirical Study On The Correlation Between Twelfth Grade Students' Prefabricated Chunks Learning And Their English Reading Comprehension Ability In View Of Cognitive Psychology

Since 1970 s,lexical chunks with both lexical and grammatical features draw more and more scholars' attention.These prefabricated chunks can not only be stored or extracted as wholes,but also reconstruct scholars' perspectives and methods of language description.In China,enhancing students' English reading comprehension ability is one of the basic requirements of the English curriculum standards,and it is also the key to raising students' ability on listening,speaking,reading and writing.Up to now,there are many researches on the relationship between students' prefabricated chunks and their English learning,while most scholars put their focus on the lexical chunks teaching or the relevance of chunks and writing ability.However,there is little empirical study on the correlation between students' prefabricated chunks learning results and their reading ability based on the theory of cognitive psychology,especially for twelfth grade students who are eager to improve their English reading.The purpose of this study is to investigate whether students' reading ability will be enhanced after they learn the prefabricated chunks,and how much correlation between students' prefabricated chunks learning and their reading ability.Three questions are tried to be answered: first,what is the general situation of twelfth grade students' prefabricated chunks learning? Second,are there any correlations between students' prefabricated chunks learning and their English reading comprehension ability? Third,should the acquisition of prefabricated chunks be one of the keys to improving students' English reading comprehension in the future?The study subjects are 74 twelfth grade students from a middle school in Luoyang,Henan Province.In order to verify whether there exists a correlation between students' prefabricated chunks learning and their English reading ability,a semester prefabricated chunks teaching experiment is conducted to intervene students' prefabricated chunks learning.74 students come from two parallel classes which are divided into the control class and the experimental class,and each class has 37 students.Students in the experimental class receive more prefabricated chunks knowledge,while students in the control class are also taught by thetraditional teaching method.Four tasks are included in the study: before the teaching experiment,students in two classes are tested about their reading ability and their prefabricated chunks learning.After the teaching experiment,the post-test is performed on the students in both classes,and the post-test has the same way as the pre-test.Then a questionnaire survey and individual interviews are followed.Finally,the results in pre-test and post-test and the correlation between student's prefabricated chunks learning and their reading ability are compared and analyzed.It is found that: first,before the teaching experiment,students in both classes have unsatisfactory learning results in the acquisition of prefabricated chunks.Second,after the teaching experiment,students' prefabricated chunks learning performance and their reading performance are both significantly improved in the experimental class,while students' prefabricated chunks learning performance are also improved in the control class,but the increment is little.Therefore,there is a correlation between students' prefabricated chunks learning and their reading comprehension ability,and it is a positive correlation.After the experiment,most students think that prefabricated chunks are helpful for their English reading ability.Thus,teachers should increase the teaching of prefabricated chunks in order to cultivate students' reading ability in the future.