The Application Of Lexical Chunk Theory To English Teaching In Senior High School

Wilkins(1972)declares that without grammar very little can be conveyed;without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed.This shows the importance of vocabulary learning.As one of the three major elements of language,vocabulary plays a key role in language learning.In senior high school English learning,teachers and students attach great importance to the accumulation and learning of vocabulary,but most of the learning methods are limited to memorizing vocabulary,dictation and blank filling.The result of this learning method is that students invest a lot of time and energy,but the results are not as good as expected,students' ability to use vocabulary has not been substantially improved,and even worse they are discouraged.With the development of vocabulary research,especially with more researches on corpora,people have discovered that there are a large number of fixed or semi-fixed formulas in English.They are composed of two or more words and are stored as a unit in learner' brain,and such multiple phrases and chunks are directly extracted without using grammatical rule processing.The concept of lexical chunks is of great significance for English vocabulary learning.Michael Lewis pointed out that lexical chunks can save language processing resources and avoid the negative transfer of mother tongue,thereby achieving the unity of correctness and fluency,which is the most ideal language learning unit.He advocates vocabulary as the core of English teaching,and teachers should improve learners' English proficiency by cultivating their vocabulary ability.In order to effectively teach English vocabulary and achieve the purpose of improving students' vocabulary ability,the author has carried out experimental research on vocabulary teaching based on Lexical Chunk Theory.This research is divided into five parts: introduction,literature review,experimental design and implementation,analysis of experimental results,conclusions and recommendations.The introduction part mainly introduces the current status of English vocabulary teaching in senior high schools,and elaborates the background and significance of the research.The literature review part starts with the basic concepts,and introduces the theoretical basis of lexicalchunk teaching and the current status of lexical chunk teaching at home and abroad.The third part is the experimental design and specific teaching measures.In the teaching experiment which lasts for a semester,the author's experimental class uses vocabulary teaching based on Lexical Chunk Theory,and the control class uses traditional vocabulary teaching methods.The fourth part is the analysis and discussion of the experimental results.The experimental results are the comparison of the results before and after the experiment.The final part is the conclusions drawn from the research and some suggestions for further research.