A Study On The Application Of The Lexical Approach To College English Reading Teaching

English reading has been one of the biggest barriers for English learners for a long time.Though English learners have enough knowledge on vocabulary and grammar,they still cannot understand the meaning of the text.The most important reason is that in reading class,teachers mostly focus on grammar,but ignore other aspects which may affect students' understanding in reading,such as lexical chunks.Therefore,this thesis adopts the lexical approach in college reading class which aims at improving College students' reading ability and studies.Also,this thesis eagers to offer some effective advice and constructive suggestions for the improvement of reading ability in college English reading teaching.Based on the lexical approach,information processing,second language acquisition,this research adopted pre-test and post-test,questionnaire,and interview as research instruments to investigate 85 freshmen majoring in Art from Guilin Tourism University.Moreover,to show its effectiveness,the thesis combined quantitative research and qualitative research together.The questionnaire for this study was designed into five parts,which depended on Guo's design of ARCS interests sack.The pre-questionnaire was divided into five parts,which are focus point,aim,confidence,satisfaction and demand.The post-questionnaire was almost the same as the pre-questionnaire.The only difference was in part five,which the post-questionnaire focus on students' attitude to the lexical approach other than students' demand.The interview was a supplement to the previous study and mostly pays attention to students' reading speed,reading accuracy and reading confidence.The results show that through the lexical approach students reading speed has been improved when doing the same level test,which is because when students do the exercise,they understand the text through the lexical approach not the single word,thus the reading speed can be improved.Otherwise,through the lexical approach,the accuracy of students' reading comprehension has also been improved.This is mainly due to the help of lexical chunks' fixed or semi-fixed structure characters.Most importantly,along with the study of the lexical approach,students' reading confidence has also been improved.Based on the research results,the author points out some effects on lexical approach from the teacher's and students' view.For teacher,lexical chunk gives the teacher a new way of teaching reading.During the teaching process,teacher can find out some deeper reasons for that why students can't read well.This helps teacher use multidimensional angles to deal with the issue.And this can help students understand texts.For students,the lexical chunk can help students understand the full text and the writing logic quickly.Thus can help students develop a sense of lexical chunk and can improve the speed and accuracy when do reading exercise.