An Empirical Study On Lexical Chunk Approach In English Vocabulary Teaching In Senior High School

Vocabulary,as one of the three elements of language,is regarded as the foundation of language acquisition and carrier of thinking.Without enough vocabulary,it is impossible to communicate effectively with others.However,though much attention has been paid to vocabulary teaching,the current situation is still far from satisfactory.In most classes,English teachers are usually at pains to stress the memory of grammatical structures and single words,which may lead to learners' lower abilities in language output.In senior high school,plenty of students still believe that vocabulary is an isolated part so they remember vocabulary by rote.Therefore,their ability to use vocabulary is still at a low level.It can be seen that some effective vocabulary learning strategies are not used in the process of learning.Teachers are faced with serious challenge on how to help students remember and use vocabulary in a more efficient way.The author considers that Lexical Chunk Approach meets students' characters of vocabulary learning in China and it is a promising way to improve the present situation of vocabulary teaching and learning.The author works on applying the Lexical Chunk Approach to vocabulary teaching and aiming to explore the following three research questions in the thesis.Question 1: Can Lexical Chunk Approach improve students' vocabulary learning strategy in senior high school?Question 2: Is there an obvious difference in vocabulary short-term memory under different vocabulary teaching methods?Question 3: Can Lexical Chunk Approach improve students' vocabulary scores in senior high school?Based on these questions,84 students from two parallel classes of Grade one in Haicheng Tongze Senior High School in Liaoning Province are chosen as the subjects.Lexical Chunk Approach is applied in EC while the traditional teaching approach is adopted in CC.In order to prove the effect of the Lexical Chunk Approach on vocabulary teaching and learning,pre-test,immediate-test,post-test,questionnaires and interview are conducted in this experiment.The results of tests,interview and questionnaires indicate that after the same teaching period,Lexical Chunk Approach contributes to improving the vocabulary learning strategy of students in senior high school.Also under different vocabularyteaching methods,there is a significant difference between EC and CC in vocabulary short-term memory.What's more,the results of post-test in EC and CC show that students' score in experiment class is improved obviously.In conclusion,Lexical Chunk Approach is beneficial to students' vocabulary learning effects in senior high school.These findings are expected to offer more practical reference to vocabulary teaching.