An Action Research On Lexical Chunk Approach In English Listening Teaching In Junior Middle School

Listening,as the foundation for language learning,has significant effect on language skills.Learners,as is known to all,can gradually master a language through a great deal of comprehensible input,and listening is able to receive the input information,which is one of the important ways.In addition,most of the input that learners receive is in the form of lexical chunks,which have a significant impact on language acquisition.Therefore,it is an important step in language acquisition to cultivate students’ English listening ability by using lexical chunks teaching model,and teachers should focus their attention on the listening teaching.In order to use the lexical chunk model more purposefully to develop junior secondary students’ English listening skills,the author combined lexical chunk teaching with English listening teaching,aiming to answer the following two research questions:(1)What is the effect of using lexical chunking method on students’ listening comprehension ability in junior English listening teaching?(2)What is the effect of lexical chunk teaching on middle school students’ use of English listening strategies?In this study,43 students from Class 1,Grade 2 of Dehui No.12 Middle School were selected as the subjects to carry out two rounds of lexical chunk teaching.In each round of action research,the author followed a pre-listening,while-listening,and post-listening instructional model in relation to the actual teaching situation in the school.At the end of the 18-week teaching of lexical chunks,the author analyzed the data from three English listening scores,student interviews,and teaching logs,and came to the following conclusions:First of all,the lexical chunk teaching method has a great influence on the listening comprehension ability of junior middle school students.The teaching of lexical chunks can improve students’ ability of discourse comprehension,prediction and selection,and thus improve their listening comprehension ability.Secondly,lexical chunk teaching can effectively improve the use of junior high school students’ English listening strategies.The analysis of the pre and post-listening strategy questionnaires showed that the cognitive strategies,metacognitive strategies,and social-emotional strategies of junior high school students were improved at the end of the action research.Specifically,eight strategies can be significantly improved,namely inference,information grouping,prediction,transference,note-taking,generalization,selective attention and overcoming anxiety.According to the results of the study,the author puts forward the following suggestions for listening teaching: First,teachers should help students develop a correct awareness of word chunk learning.Second,teachers should provide opportunities for lexcical chunks practice to strengthen students’ use of lexical chunks.Third,teaching should help students to memorize lexical chunks and construct their own lexical chunks corpus.Fourth,teachers should cultivate students to form the the habit of learning lexical chunks independently.