A Case Study Of Teaching Lexical Chunks And Improving Speaking English Proficiency In Children

Based mainly on Lewis? lexical approach,the thesis has reported a study on the correlation between lexical chunk teaching and the improvement of children?s speaking proficiency.As far as we know,speaking is one of the four important goals in English teaching,and speaking proficiency is also one of the most important abilities for English learners.However,it is found that most children are weak in speaking;they can hardly communicate properly in English.The author finds that it is difficult for teachers to use traditional ways to improve children?s speaking,but lexical chunk teaching might in some way help.Since 1990,the idea of teaching lexical chunks has been introduced to China and it has been widely used in translation,writing and vocabulary teaching,and in teaching speaking as well.Therefore,the current research tries to use the lexical chunk teaching method and see if it can help improve children?s speaking proficiency.In order to make the teaching process valid,the author has done a lot of research on the understanding of lexical chunks,and the teaching of lexical chunks both at home and abroad.Taking a boy from a primary school as a case,the author gave him classes three times a week,emphasizing the lexical chunks understanding and learning.The whole teaching process lasts twelve weeks based on the course book for primary school students named Core English B1 published by Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press(2010).Each class we would have a recording for his presentation in two or three minutes.Then the recording is transcribed and analyzed according to the five indicators: speech rate,articulation rate,phonation time ratio,mean length of speech run,and average pause of length.This study intends to answer three questions.1)How do English language teachers perform chunk teaching in primary school? 2)In what ways can lexical chunk teaching help children improve their speaking proficiency?The research found that teaching lexical chunk can help children?s language learning and improve students? oral proficiency in various ways measured by the indicators.