A Study Of Lexical Chunks In English News Listening Teaching In College

It has been almost40years since Becker put forward lexical chunk theory in1975. In comparison with the abroad, the related researches which carried out at homewere not very early, but many great findings have been worked out in both theory andpractice. Traditionally, the learning of foreign language is divided into vocabulary andgrammar. Grammar is the frame, lexis is fillers. However, in accordance with theincreasing development of cognitive psychology and lexical approach, the learning ofvocabulary is traditional by no means conducted in an isolated way as in word list, butis always carried out through lexical chunks. During language production, lexicalchunk is a pre-stored multiword unit for instant retrieval without binding isolatedwords into grammatical frames. It enhances the accuracy and fluency of languageproduction, and easing the burden of language production. On this account, lexicalchunks as lexical approach’s core which is considered as a new insight into teachingEnglish news listening. The author based on the state of affairs in English teachingand previous studies and achievements in lexical chunks, applying the lexical chunks’instruction into teaching practice, with the purpose of improving college Englishlearners’ news listening competence.In the present study,62students from Shenyang Institute of Engineering joinedin this research for ten weeks. The research subjects are divided into two classes, theexperimental class (EC) and the control class (CC). The application of lexicalchunk-based approach to the English news listening teaching is carried out in the experimental class. Qualitative and quantitative methodologies are also utilized inorder to confirm the effectiveness of improving learners’ English news listeningcomprehension proficiency. The approach of lexical chunk-based is taught to theexperimental class. In contrast, the approach of traditional teaching is applied to thecontrol class. The related data were collected from the two news listening tests: thepretests and the posttests.As the results of the experiment shown, there is no significant difference betweenEC and CC before the experiment, there is evidence shown that the majority of ECmake obvious progress than the CC in news listening proficiency.The final results confirm that the approach of lexical chunk-based in newslistening learning and teaching is effective.The author suggests that the news listening teaching should be based on atheoretical framework which is clear cut, such as the lexical chunk approach. Theauthor hopes that this study presents some implications for the approach of lexicalchunk-based approach applications in English news listening teaching and learning.