A Study Of Senior High School English Vocabulary Teaching Guided By The Lexical Chunk Theory

In the 1980s,corpus linguistics has developed rapidly,which leads linguists to turn their attention from simple vocabulary and complex grammar to lexical chunks.Researchers have found that there are many special linguistic structures in English natural language,which have both syntactic and lexical features.Later,these special language structures are collectively known as: lexical chunks.The lexical chunks include some fixed and semi-fixed structures,idioms and fixed collocations,sentence frame,slang.Some researchers believe that these lexical chunks can be regarded as approached structures,which are stored in the human brain as a whole and can be extracted directly or used after processing.The existence of lexical chunks accelerates the speed of language processing,and conforms to the basic laws of students’ cognition.Lexical chunks make great contributions to the fluency and authenticity of acquisition and language output.At present,in high school English classroom teaching,due to limited time and heavy course,the time for teaching vocabulary has been compressed.Moreover,the English vocabulary teaching under the traditional teaching approach is difficult to adapt to the current learning needs.Vocabulary teaching is still based on mechanical memory and isolated explanations.Therefore,this thesis is devoted to studying whether the vocabulary teaching approach under the guidance of lexical chunk theory can effectively improve the status of vocabulary teaching and whether it can help students enhance their comprehensive language capacity.Domestic and foreign scholars have carried out different levels of research on lexical chunks,such as “The Empirical Study of Lexical Teaching Method to Alleviate English Listening Anxiety”,“The Application of Lexical Teaching Method in Junior Middle School English Writing Teaching” and “Teaching and Learning Vocabulary”,but the study of applying vocabulary teaching approach guided by the lexical chunk theory to high school vocabulary teaching is not sufficient.Based on the chunk theory,this thesis aims to investigate 92 senior high school students in order to observe the current situation of learning lexical chunks and the differences between the traditional teaching approach and lexical teaching approach.The author applies questionnaire,pre-test and post-test methods to analyze the three main research questions:(1)What’s the current situation of students learning lexical chunks?(2)What’s the difference between traditional vocabulary teaching approach and lexical teaching approach?(3)What influence does the vocabulary teaching approach guided by the lexical chunk theory have on improving students’ comprehensive language capacity?Through the analysis and discussion of the research results,the paper draws the following conclusions: first,students have a certain understanding of the lexical chunks and have a certain ability in learning lexical chunks and students are good at using some learning ways to help them learn lexical chunks,such as consult the dictionary,take notes,guess the meaning of lexical chunks through the context and self-initiation.Second,compared with the lexical teaching approach,traditional teaching approach pays more attention to the meaning,memory,usage and collocations of the words.While,the lexical teaching approach concentrates on making the vocabulary into chunks and blends them into context to study.Finally,the vocabulary teaching approach guided by the lexical chunk theory has a certain role in promoting students’ English language proficiency,mainly reflecting in the overall level of students,especially in listening,reading and cloze questions as well as students’ self-confidence.In general,the lexical teaching approach has a certain positive impact on students’ vocabulary learning,and students have a high degree of acceptance of the lexical teaching approach.At the end of the study,the author puts forward some suggestions to promote the better development of the lexical teaching experiment,and hopes to have some aids for future research and teaching.