The Application Of The Lexical Approach In Oral English Teaching At Senior High School

Oral English,as one of the fundamental part in English teaching,plays a decisive role in language acquisition.In daily English teaching,most teachers are concerned about the spread of language knowledge,rather than language skills.Few students can get exercise in spoken English.As a result,their declarative knowledge has enjoyed unprecedented growth,but the mastery of procedural knowledge is far from satisfactory.A great deal of researches have been done to explore a way for Chinese students to improve their communicative skills.Although there have been many researches on lexical approach and Oral English teaching and some achievements have been made,few researches focus on the study of oral English of senior high school students.Given that,this thesis takes 80 students from two classes in Nanjing N senior high school as experimental subjects to explore the effect of the application of lexical approach and hope that the research result can serve as a helpful supplement to previous studies in this field.Based on Lewis's lexical approach and referring to the relevant results of lexical teaching abroad,this study was carried out to answer the following three questions:(1)To what extent did the application of lexical approach affect students'communicative fluency?(2)To what extent did the application of lexical approach affect students'communicative accuracy?(3)To what extent did the application of lexical approach affect students'communicative complexity?In light of the questions above,three-month lexical teaching experiment was conducted.The experimental process included oral pretest,pre-test questionnaire,oral posttest,post-test questionnaire and a sample interview as research instruments to assist the analysis.With the help of SPSS 17.0 statistical software,descriptive analysis,Independent Sample T-test,Paired Sample T-test and linear regression analysis were operated.The results revealed that:(1)The application of lexical approach was helpful to improve students'communicative fluency.Among the three indicators of chunk use,there were linear correlations among chunk proportion,average length of pause,mean length of run and articulation rate.Chunk variety could also predict phonation/time ratio.(2)The application of lexical approach was helpful to improve students'communicative accuracy.There was a linear correlation among chunk frequency,proportion and accuracy,which meant that lexical learning and the improvement of communicative accuracy were closely related.(3)The application of lexical approach was helpful to improve students'communicative complexity.The regression analysis showed that chunk variety could significantly predict communicative complexity.Furthermore,a semi-structured interview was conducted to partly testify the reliability of research results.According to the findings above,some pedagogical implications were proposed:(1)Teachers should change teaching concept and cultivate students' awareness of chunk.(2)Teachers ought to design teaching tasks rationally to balance the stylistic and creative use of language.(3)Teachers are supposed to develop students' ability to accumulate chunk independently.