Experimental Research On Application Of Lexical Theory In English Grammar Teaching

There have been numerous suggested approaches and methods on grammar learning in the field of English teaching,from traditional rules-explanation based grammar translation approach to well-acknowledged communicative approach.However,the approaches on grammar teaching have always been in controversial.The traditional grammar rules + words model is still applied by many English teachers,which has received wide criticism for its obvious drawbacks.Many researchers and linguists are trying to make a change of the situation,as a result,the recent decades saw a succession of reforms in grammar teaching,among which some studies show positive result,whereas others do not.Although the communicative approach has received a warm welcome,it seems to have largely ignored the importance of grammar in English learning.There is no denying that grammar is an indispensable and essential part for both learning and teaching of English.But how to make this boring and tedious task interesting and appealing is yet to be resolved.In the 1990 s Lewis put forward his famous lexical approach,which received immediate response from practitioners and then researches.However most of them are around how to make use of it to increase learners’ vocabulary or to enhance their writing or speaking ability,with very few on grammar teaching.In fact,the knowledge of lexical chunks has brought people’s awareness that grammar is no longer a set of rigid rules of structure but a unity of both structure and meaning.Some scholars and teachers have already started in attempt to explore a new way to enhance learner’s grammar ability from a lexical perspective.In traditional approach,too much attention is paid to teaching and practicing of grammatical rules,which contributes no good to communication at all since learners are very likely to produce quite large number of grammatically correct sentences,which seem wired even bizarre to native speakers.This is particularly true in non-English speaking countries.The good news is thatresearchers have started to apply the lexical theory in grammar teaching,with the intention to help language learners to produce native like languages,natural and fluent.All the researches are under the principle of lexical approach,which claims that language is a lexicalized grammar,not grammaticalized lexis.(Lewis,1993)As lexical chunks are not just a word or word-combinations;it could be as long as a whole sentence,including a single word,parts of a word,sayings,sentence heads,etc,many of which are attached with grammatical information.For example,“if I were you” or “indications are that…” Lexical approach supporters believe that as long as you can utter a structure complete discourse then your grammar will be most probably correct.Therefore lexical chunks are regarded as a perfect unity of grammar and vocabulary.Ideally,learning lexical chunks contributes to every aspect of English,grammar not excluded.This paper is based on the theory of Lexical Approach by Michael Lewis,who believes language is not just a series of words connected together with grammar rules but made up with prefabricated chunks,which are seen as a whole and with grammatical characteristic themselves.This research is designed to solve the following problems:1)Is teaching grammar lexically worth of a promotion to a broader sphere?2)Does lexical teaching enjoy more advantage in facilitating the learners’ grammar ability over traditional approaches?3)What are the possible influences of lexical theory on teachers?The study is carried out via a quantitative analysis method.80 first-year college students from 2 natural classes,both with the size of 40,are brought under observation and one class is the experimental group and the other the control group.The researcher pre-tests all of them with an essay-writing and makes an analysis of the statistics from one-way ANOVA to determine if the experiment is reliable to undertake.During the experiment period,the two classes are instructed by the same teacher with a different method,the experimental class being taught lexically while the control class in a traditional way.The teacher instructs lexical knowledge to the experimental group and asks for repeated practice of lexicalchunks learned.All the chunks learned are expected to be remembered.Meanwhile,the control group is taught in a traditional way.After 18 weeks’ experiment,the two groups are post-tested with exactly the same paper of the pre-test and their final scores are analyzed by a dependent test to see if there exist significant differences between scores of the pre-test and one-way ANOVA is conducted to confirm if there exist obvious differences between the two classes.After analyzing the data collected in the experiment,the researcher comes to the conclusion that teaching lexically has a positive influence on learners’ grammar ability.The outcome of the experiment is helpful for both teaching and learning,which provides an alternative for the teaching of grammar.Learners can also get their learning more efficient and effective by chunking their way to success.