A Study Of Teaching English Lexical Chunks In Junior Middle School Classroom Based On The Lexical Approach

This thesis reports a study on teaching lexical chunks under the instruction of the Lexical Approach in junior middle school classroom. A case study was carried out on New Standard English. There are three research questions in this thesis, which include key points and designing rules in teaching lexical chunks in New Standard English, the problems a teacher might encounter in teaching lexical chunks, the reasons for the problems in teaching lexical chunks. Descriptive statistics, classroom observation and interview are used in this study to answer the three research questions.To start with, different types of lexical chunks appearing in New Standard English were counted manually and recorded further with the help of Microsoft Excel(2010), to work out the proportions of different types of lexical chunks in New Standard English so as to find out the key points in New Standard English concerning the teaching lexical chunks. After that, variation trend of lexical chunks throughout all the six books of New Standard English, as well as the correlation between numbers of collocations and expressions were analyzed with the help of Pearson Correlation(SPSS 23), soas to work out the designing rules in New Standard English with regard to teaching lexical chunks.Furthermore, classroom observation was adopted to find out problems in teaching lexical chunks. One teacher and her students from X junior middle school were selected as the research subjects. The entire class was recorded and transcribed.Finally, an interview was carried out to explore the reasons for problems in teaching lexical chunks. The teacher in the classroom observation took part in the interview.The results from the descriptive statistics reveal that collocations are the key points in New Standard English; there is no obvious suggested acquisition rules in New Standard English, and collocations and expressions have to be learnt together at all stages in junior middle school, and they can’t replace each other, which are the designing rules in New Standard English. The results from classroom observation show that the students speak too much in class; on the contrary, exercises and activities aboutnoticing lexical chunks and chunking a passage or dialogue are far from enough; the teacher doesn’t do any work to help students read tone units correctly. The results from interview indicate that the reasons for the problems are that the teacher is influenced by structural teaching methods and communicative methods; furthermore, English lessons are still exam-oriented to a large degree; the teacher is lack of the awareness to explore the textbooks in a comprehensive way.Lexical chunks are regarded as being essential for speakers to make fluent and accurate expression. By studying teaching lexical chunks in junior middle school classroom, this thesis puts forward some methodological suggestions, and explores the problems in teaching lexical chunks as well as reasons for the problems, which will be helpful for students to develop the ability to communicate freely with other people.