Study On Effects Of Lexical Approach On Students’ Listening Comprehension Ability In Senior High School

As a receptive skill, listening skill is of great importance among the four basic language skills, the foundation to develop speaking, reading and writing skills. It is difficult to produce and express high-quality language if there is no much language input.Therefore cultivating students’ listening comprehension ability is a success way to English teaching and learning. However, listening learning is a weak link in senior high school students’ English learning. It mainly results from students’ over-emphasis on recognizing the single words instead of the linguistic forms in the process of listening.According to the study of corpus and second language acquisition, researchers find that the language people use in daily life is not fragmentary, but some ready-made phrases or fixed expressions, which is called formulaic language. They are lexis-syntax unit stored in mind with stable collocation, fixed form and given context. The usage of formulaic language in listening can enlarge the capacity of short-term memory and can ease the processing burden. They also can reduce the anxiety over the listening materials.They help hearers reduce or even omit the unnecessary processing step and compress the time needed for language information processing, and finally cultivate their top-down listening strategies. Based on formulaic language, Lewis put forward a new method—the lexical approach whose core is “Language consists of grammaticalized lexis, not lexicalized grammar”.This paper is mainly based on the theories of formulaic language. It adopts questionnaires and experiment to explore how the lexical approach work in the process of listening comprehension and the experiment involves senior high school students in grade two in Ganzhou. The experiment results suggest that the lexical approach plays an important role in students’ listening comprehension ability. In other words, the lexical approach can facilitate students’ listening comprehension ability. However, the contribution of lexical approach is not exactly the same to students with different listening score levels. High score group benefits most, average score group benefiting second and low score group benefiting the least.Therefore, teachers should help students raise their awareness of using lexicalchunks, and teach them with the lexical approach in listening class. And they should organize all kinds of activities to help students from the three listening score group to facilitate their listening ability, especially to help the low listening score group.