A Case Study On Learning Strategies For Lexical Chunks Of Excellent Senior Middle School Students

Vocabulary plays a vital role in the process of language learning, withoutwhich, listening, speaking, reading, writing and translating can not beimproved. However, vocabulary teaching was not paid enough attention to,but separated from grammar teaching.With corpus linguistics developing in the1980s, it has been found bymany English researchers that there are a great many fixed or semi-fixedexpressions (i.e.1exical chunks) with the features of syntax in English speech,which can be stored, retrieved and used as a whole. The existence of theseexpressions or lexical chunks can speed up the language processing and fosterboth language acquisition and easy, fluent and idiomatic language output.Therefore, many researchers began to focus their attention on lexical chunks.However, most of them remain at the theoretical level of discussion,combined with college students and writing’s teaching, empirical researches,especially the chunks teaching in middle schools are less, let alone the studyrelated to students’ learning strategies.By a case study on lexical chunks competence and related learning strategies of three excellent students in a foreign senior middle school inShanxi Taiyuan, this thesis tries to find out; firstly the features of excellentmiddle school students’ learning of lexical chunks; secondly the learningstrategies excellent middle school students adopt; thirdly the factors affectingstudents’ learning of lexical chunks.In this thesis, diary, questionnaire and interview are conducted. As isrevealed in the research,1) excellent students have highly awareness of chunkrecognition and competence;2) Excellent students adopt integrated strategies,such as determination strategy, social strategy, metacognitive strategy,cognitive strategy and memorizing strategy;3) Other factors, such asstudents’ personality, learning motivation and anxiety have some effect onchunks learning.Through the analysis, this thesis has the following implication. Firstly,teachers have the responsibility to raise the awareness of chunk recognition ofstudents and students should learn more lexical chunks; Furthermore, teachersshould encourage students’ integrated use of strategies; Last but not least,teachers should pay more attention to students’ personality, motivation and anxiety for more effective teaching.