A Study Of "Basic English" Teaching For English Majors Based On The Theory Of Lexical Chunk

How to improve the learners’ overall abilities of English is a keyproblem which has been constantly thought over and has to be solved in China’sEnglish teaching community. The lexical chunk, as a linguistic unit in vocabularyteaching, has already been attached much importance to. This research is based onthe theory of lexical chunk and aims at improving the English majors’ overallabilities of language by employing Modern University English—Intensive Reading(The Second Edition) published by Foreign Language Teaching and Research Pressas the main experimental textbook. The theory of lexical chunk is applied to guideone year’s teaching of the course, Basic English for the freshmen majoring inEnglish. Through the activities of the input, absorption, practice and output of thelexical chunks, the teaching intends to explore and see whether the use of the lexicalchunk theory can effectively improve the English learners’ overall abilities oflanguage. After the data and questionnaires analysis, the conclusion is drawn that theteaching of Basic English based on the lexical chunk theory can improve theEnglish majors’ quality of their productive vocabulary, their efficiency of Englishlearning and their overall abilities to use English.This thesis consists of five parts. The first chapter is the introduction, whichincludes the research background, its significance and the thesis structure. Thesecond chapter is about the theoretical basis of the lexical chunks teaching, includingan overview of the lexical chunk theory, the chunks functions in second languageacquisition, the theories of the lexical chunks teaching and the contemporarysituations of the chunks teaching research both at home and abroad. The third chapterdescribes the teaching experiment in the course of Basic English guided by thelexical chunk theory, discussing the experimental purpose, the experimentalhypotheses, the experimental subjects，the experimental methods and teaching experiment process together with a case of the teaching design of one text from theBasic English textbook. In the fourth chapter, the questionnaires and exams dataare analyzed and summarized. The fifth chapter is the conclusion with the summaryof and reflection on the teaching experiment research.