The Application Of Prefabricated Chunks In English Teaching At Senior Middle School

The aim of language teaching is to train learners to communicate with target language accurately and fluently.For many years, linguists have been doing research on language teaching continuously, with the attempt to adopt different teaching methods to reach the goal.In recent years, linguists have been paying more attention to Lexical Approach, based on the concept that an important part of language acquisition is the ability to comprehend and produce lexical phrases as unanalyzed wholes, or "chunks". It focuses on developing learners' language with words and word combinations.In the 1970s, Becker (1975) and Bolinger (1976) called them prefabricated chunks. Chunks are larger linguistic units which appear in the real communication at high frequency and are more fixed in structures.The method of teaching by prefabricated chunks offers a new way of teaching. The essay probes into the application of prefabricated chunks in English teaching practice at senior high school level.This essay starts by defining and classifying prefabricated chunks. Different scholars have different opinions about the classification of chunks. In this essay, Wray's theory is adopted.Then, the essay introduces the advantages of prefabricated chunks to second language acquisition. It has positive effect on second language acquisition. It lessens the burden of short-term memory, accelerates the decoding ability of brains, facilitates language idiomaticity and vividness and cultivates text organizing and understanding ability. Being larger linguistic units and more fixed in structures, they have many advantages of being the ideal in English Learning and teaching.To prove the necessity of the research, the method of teaching English by prefabricated chunks has been employed in an experiment. Data analysis shows that teaching English by chunks can improve learners' ability of English learning.The Approach integrates language learning into communicative competence, and it fits in the Chinese students' character, mobilizes learners' positive factors. What's more,it improves students' ability of learning.Finally, the paper concludes that although it is far from being perfect, the approach indeed offers us a new perspective to language teaching in senior high school.