On The Application Of Lexical Chunks To English Vocabulary Teaching In Senior High School

As one of the three basic elements of language, vocabulary is the basis of English listening, speaking, reading, and translating. It is very important for the learners to master a certain amount of vocabulary. However, even if the learners spend a lot of time and energy in memorizing the vocabulary, they still cannot get an expected result. They all think it is hard to memorize vocabulary, and even if they master the vocabulary, they will forget them soon. Gradually, the learners lose the original enthusiasm. The main reason is that the teachers teach vocabulary in isolation, and the students don’t have a proper vocabulary learning strategy. It becomes an urgent task to help the learners to find an effective vocabulary learning method and improve the efficiency of vocabulary learning.In 1980 s, the development of corpora linguistics enables linguists and teachers a new insight into vocabulary teaching. It is found that in human language there exist large quantities of phrases and sentence structures which appear in the communication frequently and are more fixed in form and structures. These expressions are called lexical chunks. They are stored in human brain and used as a whole. As the semi-finished products and basic learning units of a language, lexical chunks reduce the learners’ burden of memory and play a very important role not only in the acquisition of language but also helping to promote the easy, fluent and idiomatic language production. Because of the advantages of the lexical chunks in English vocabulary teaching, linguists and experts pay more and more attention to the studies in this field. Lewis’ “Lexical Approach”(1993) is one of the distinguished studies. It advocates the training of the learners’ skills of mastering the poly words, high frequency collocations, institutionalized utterances and sentence builders which appear frequently in daily communication, and therefore combines the acquisition of vocabulary and grammar with the training of communication skills.This research is guided by the lexical chunks theory, and tries to study the application of lexical chunks in English vocabulary teaching of senior high school. The purpose of the research is to help the students find an effective way to learn English vocabulary. There are five steps in the teaching approach, and they are establishing consciousness of lexical chunks, identifying lexical chunks, explaining lexical chunks, consolidating lexical chunks and applying lexical chunks. Firstly, the author proves the importance and necessity of the research through quantities of documents and materials. Then, the different results of the two questionnaires indicate the different acquaintances of the students in the experimental class before and after the research. At the same time, during the four-month teaching experiment, the author teaches the vocabulary in a traditional way in the control class, while applies the lexical chunks approach in the experimental class to direct the students to establish consciousness of lexical chunks, to learn to identify lexical chunks, to consolidate lexical chunks and to apply lexical chunks through a large number of exercises. At last, the author analyses all the results of the questionnaires, the pretest, and the post-test, and comes to the conclusion that it is reasonable and practical to apply the lexical chunks theory in English vocabulary teaching of senior high school.