A Research On The Application Of Chunks Of English Words At Senior High School Level

Vocabulary learning is an important component in language learning. The importance of vocabulary teaching has been fully recognized by teachers of senior high school. But for students they are still poor in memorizing words. What's more, even though some students can memorize a large number of new words, problems still arise from the inner process of transferring from language input to language output.The method of teaching by chunks offers a new way of solving these problems. The essay probed into the application of lexical chunks in English teaching practice at senior high school level.This essay starts by defining and classifying lexical chunks. Lexical chunks are the unity of grammatical rules, semantic meanings and pragmatic contexts. They are larger linguistic units which appear in the real communication at high frequency and are more fixed in structures. Different scholars have different opinions about the classification of chunks. In this essay, Lewis' theory is adopted. Then the essay focuses on the theoretical bases. Being larger linguistic units and more fixed in structures, they have many advantages of being the ideal unit in English learning and teaching.To prove the necessity of the research, a questionnaire was conducted among the students at the beginning of this term. The result shows that students are more accustomed to individual words and grammar. Then, the method of teaching English by lexical chunks has been employed in an experiment. Data analysis shows that teaching English by chunk can improve learners' ability of English learning.The essay points out the method which offers the teachers a new perspective to English language teaching greatly improves the students' abilities of learning by themselves.