The Application Of Lexical Chunks To English Reading Teaching At Senior High School Level

With the Criterion of the New English Curriculum issued, it is more and more important to cultivate the students' reading ability in senior high schools. Teachers have tried out many different teaching approaches to improve students' reading proficiency and at the same time, students also endeavor to improve their reading ability by doing mountains of reading exercises, However, it turns out that most of the students are still weak at reading comprehension. This thesis is a tentative probe into the teaching of reading by introducing lexical approach and discussing its effect on EFL reading comprehension.Lexical approach, a new language teaching theory, is proposed under the background that foreign language teaching should aim at develop students' pragmatic competence. Avoiding the shortcomings of relying too heavy on either theories of grammar on one hand, or theories of communicative competence on the other, the lexical approach shows its unique advantages in language teaching in term of listening, speaking or writing. Therefore, the lexical approach to second language teaching has received great interest as an alternative to grammar-based approaches. Lots of linguists have done much research on it. It is shown that lexical approach is of significant use for English learners and EFL teaching.This thesis seeks to investigate the effect of lexical chunks on EFL reading. Two intact classes of students in Senior Two in Fuqing No. 1 High School were assigned to experimental and control conditions. 49 students in the experimental class received guidelines of lexical approach, while 50 students in the control class followed the traditional way of teaching. The experiment lasted for eight weeks. Tests and a questionnaire survey were conducted among the students in the EC and in the CC. All the data collected from the tests and the survey was entered into computer and processed with the SPSS 10.0. The analysis reveals that the reading achievement of the students in the EC is better than that of the students in the CC. From the findings we know the students with the knowledge of lexical chunks can get better performance in English reading and improve their English proficiency as well. The lexical approach is very effective in English reading in senior high schools.