Study On The Application Of Lexical Chunks In English Majors’ Reading Comprehension

For a long time, English reading has always been one of the problems bothering students. Although they have a good command of grammar and vocabulary, they still cannot perform well in English reading tests. In light of this situation, linguists put forward the chunking model. This study applies the theory of lexical chunks to English reading teaching and learning, aiming to explore four questions:1) What kind of problems do students encounter in the process of reading? 2) Do students have the awareness of using lexical chunks in their reading process? 3) Is there a relation between the lexical chunks and the reading ability? If there is, what is it? 4) How do lexical chunks influence comprehension in different reading themes, such as popular science theme and social cultural theme?The subjects of the study are 93 sophomores majoring in English from Qingdao University of Science and Technology. The study adopts both quantitative method and qualitative method.1) The questionnaire is used to investigate students’attitudes towards reading, to discover their problems and reading habits in the reading process, to know whether they have the awareness of lexical chunks, and to differentiate their lexical chunk ability level; 2) The writing task aims to further distinguish students’ lexical chunk ability level; 3) The reading comprehension test is used to evaluate their reading comprehension ability; 4) The interview aims to clearly know students’ awareness of lexical chunks and their attitudes towards applying lexical chunks into reading teaching and learning.Based on the data analysis and discussion, four major findings are concluded:1) Students are lack of interests in reading and sometimes they read English articles just in order to deal with examinations. There are some bad habits in the process of reading (such as asking for help when coming across new words or looking back to read the preceding parts now and then) and students are short of reading skills.2) Students are lack of lexical chunks awareness.3) The more a student masters lexical chunks, the higher his reading ability is.4) The effect of lexical chunks is different in different themes of reading materials. Students both in high-level lexical chunk ability group and in low-level lexical chunk ability group get higher scores in the theme of social culture, and the scores in high-level lexical chunk ability group is higher than that in low-level lexical chunk ability group. These findings offer some implications to English reading teaching and learning in the future.