| applied linguistics tries to find a compromise between these approaches. The lexical approach came into being against this background. In 1997, Michael Lewis published his book The Lexical Approach and became the representative for his revolutionary approach. In this book, he discarded the traditional view of language and tried to look at language and language teaching from a totally new angle. In his opinion, language is a grammaticalized lexis rather than lexicalized grammar. In particular, the lexis here refers to the concept"lexical chunks", which comprises the core of Lexical Approach. .Lewis stated that lexical chunks are rather fixed language forms that appear frequently in real communication. They are widely used by most language users within that speech community. According to his understanding,the continuous and coherent language used by most native language users result from the combination of these frequently used and meaningful chunks. This Point has also been verified by scientific statistics. After a research into linguistic corpus,Yang Yuchen claimed that 90% of language used by adult native speakers originate from lexical chunks(1999:24-31). In order to achieve a good effect for language teaching,teaching itself should also respect this feature of language. Therefore,lexical chunks are treated as the basis for language teaching and learning in Lexical Approach.The core idea of the Lexical Chunk Teaching is to regard lexical chunks as the basic units for language teaching and learning. This could be attributed to the following considerations. To begin with,lexical chunks are treated as an unanalyzed whole in cognition and memory. In real communication,they are retrieved as a whole as well. In this case,learners do not have to construct sentences by applying rules plus words,but mostly construct sentences with the help of the learned chunks. This characteristic helps reduce their processing burden,while at the same time more attention can be given to the overall structure of their idea. These two points work together to help improve the fluency of their expressions. Secondly,in applying Lexical Chunk Teaching,through awareness- raising of lexical chunks,learners will habitually begin to treat lexical chunks as their learning materials. The acquired chunks,as a whole,will be applied directly during production or applied after variation. This feature of Lexical Chunk Teaching guarantees that the production by learners could be close to that of native speakers to the maximum degree; hence the possibility of idiomaticity and accuracy. Lastly,regarding grammar instruction, Lexical Chunk Teaching does not totally neglect grammar, therefore, Lexical Chunk Teaching is not simply a shift from grammar to lexis. On the contrary,it proposes to integrate lexical chunks with grammar rules. More specifically, after their analysis of lexical chunks,learners make hypotheses on language rules involved,which may be verified or falsified in other cases. Then,a new hypothesis formed and evaluation is conducted again. The procedure of"Observe-Hypothesis-Experiment"lasts constantly until the rule in question is acquired.To test the feasibility of the Lexical Chunk Teaching in college English teaching,two classes of non- English majors from Sias University are chosen as subjects. They are in the same grade and same major. Considering their English applying ability in the same level, they are divided into control and subject so that a quasi-experiment is carried out. The first experiment is to certify the relationship between lexical chunk ability and pragmatic competence by a lexical chunk translation test and a sentence translation test. Then, the lexical approach is applied to experiment class for one semester, students of two classes take lexical chunk and writing as a point to test the efficiency of the lexical approach. As a result, the subject has an obvious advantage. All possible variables being controlled to the greatest degree, it is concluded that the lexical chunk teaching is valid in English teaching and learning for college non-English majors. From the experiment,some implications are inferred: firstly,teaching and learning English through Lexical Chunks helps enhance teaching and learning effect; secondly,teaching techniques even typical of other approaches could be adopted for serving the Lexical Chunk teaching; thirdly,grammar is not totally discarded in the Lexical Chunk teaching. Therefore, it is necessary to balance grammar teaching with the Lexical Chunk teaching in the case of Chinese college English teaching. |
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