A Study Of Vocabulary Teaching In Senior High School From The Perspective Of Lexical Chunk Theory

After four years' amendment,the Ministry of Education of China published English Curriculum Standards for Common Senior School in Jan.2018,which makes specific description of high school students' English ability.As for vocabulary,the “New Curriculum Standard” clearly states that high school students should “acquire the habitual collocation of adjectives and nouns,verbs and adverbs,verbs and nouns;gradually accumulate lexical chunks;express meanings precisely and describe things properly”.At the same time,it proposes that in teaching practice,much attention should be paid to the cultivation of students' learning strategies,such as meta-cognitive strategies,cognitive strategies,communication strategies and affective strategies with the aim to promote the development of students' life-long learning ability.As one of the three major elements of language,the importance of vocabulary for language learning is self-evident.With the continuous advancement of the English curriculum reform in senior high school,the methods and effects of English learning in high schools have become the research focus of learners,teachers and linguists.Scholars have conducted many researches on senior high school English teaching from different perspectives of reading,writing,speaking,listening,vocabulary study and so on,which has achieved substantial research results.However,these theoretical achievements haven't been practiced and experimented in English teaching process.Therefore,in English learning practice,it is a universal phenomenon that vocabulary is the challenging barrier for most senior students who complain that it is a tough task to memorize English words and it is very easy to forget the words they have learned.According to the lexical chunks theory put forward by Altenberg,a language ismainly made up of lexical chunks,which have both semantic function and structural function with abundant grammatical information.Once the learners have mastered lexical chunks proficiently,they can use the language creatively,thus achieving the purpose of effective communication.Influenced by lexical chunks theory,the author made a systematic study on lexical chunks and put it in practice in her own vocabulary teaching.The subjects of the experiment are two parallel classes and seven English teachers are from a Middle School in Yan'an City,of which Class One is the experimental class and Class Two is the control class.In the experimental class,the vocabulary teaching was carried out under the guidance of lexical chunks while in the control class traditional vocabulary teaching method was still used,and the research period was 15 weeks.The author held a vocabulary test in the two classes before the experiment to test the students' vocabulary level.After that,a questionnaire survey was conducted in the experimental class.After the experiment,the author conducted a post test in two classes and a questionnaire survey in the experimental class to gather related information and data,and then had an interview with English teachers there.Finally,the results were analyzed by SPSS19.0,and the purpose was to test whether there was a significant difference caused by different teaching methods in vocabulary.The research results show that the vocabulary teaching guided by lexical chunks theory not only can help the learners change their short-term memory of vocabulary into long term memory of vocabulary,but also make it easier,more convenient and simpler to extract language chunks without making any further process of information,thus improving the efficiency and accuracy of the actual use of vocabulary and changing the boring mode of vocabulary learning into an interesting one.Besides,the vocabulary learning strategies are diversified,thus greatly enhancing the efficiency of English learning.Based on this empirical study,the author has summarized some strategies of high school English vocabulary learning,hoping to offer effective assistance to high school English learners,and at the same time these strategies can throwsome light on vocabulary teaching in high school and further enrich the theoretical foundation of high school English vocabulary teaching.