A Correlational Research On English Majors' Ability Of Identifying Lexical Chunks And Their Reading Ability

In the process of second language acquisition,reading is a crucial way of acquiring knowledge.Reading ability is also regarded as an important part of English teaching.But in the actual teaching process,the students' reading is weak.On the one hand,most students pay more attention to vocabulary and grammar;on the other hand,students also lack reading skills to a certain extent.Lexical chunks have both lexical and grammatical characteristics.They can be memorized and extracted as a whole by the learners without generation or analysis by grammatical rules.Lexical chunks can expedite language processing and improve their reading comprehension ability,so as to enhance their English proficiency.Therefore,lexical chunks play a vital role in English teaching and learning.In recent years,lexical chunks have drawn more and more attention by linguists.More and more scholars and teaching staffs do research on lexical chunks from different point of view,which have made more fruitful achievements.At present,the studies in China mainly focus on the relation between lexical chunks and writing or lexical chunks and oral output,so the correlation between lexical chunks and reading ability can be further explored.As one kind of feeling and perception,language sense is a ambiguous concept.It is the direct reaction of the objective world in the human brain.The English language sense refers to people's perception of English.The studies on language sense in the field of English teaching have been a concern for scholars.In this study,language sense will focus on the language phenomenon— lexical chunks.Only possessing enough perception(language sense)of lexical chunks can learners identify lexical chunks.Thus it will be connected with the English reading to explore whether there is a correlation between the learners' identification of lexical chunks and reading ability,then further to analyze reasons.Through this experiment,the purpose of this paper is to answer three questions:(1)whether learners have the ability to identify lexical chunks in reading,and which types of lexical chunks are easier to identify?(2)Are there any correlations between learners' identification of lexical chunks and reading ability?The subjects of this study are freshmen of English majors from the two parallel classes at Yangtze University.This study involves three tasks: the first task is to complete lexical chunks identification test.The participants are required to identify the language points regarding their cognitive level.The researcher needs to classify the types and quantity of these points and analyze the accordingly data.The secondtask is to complete two reading comprehension tests at same difficulty level after lexical chunks identification test.One passage is printed in the form of normal lexical chunks without any change;the other one is made up with abnormal lexical chunks(disrupted lexical chunks),then the results of these two passages will be collected.The third task is to select several students to take a interview and figure out the psychological process and the reason for identifying lexical chunks.Through the experiment,the following conclusions will be drawn:(1)In reading,the participants can realize and identify lexical chunks,most of which are polywords and collocations.(2)There is a strong correlation between the learners' ability of identifying lexical chunks and their reading ability.That is to say,the more lexical chunks can be identified,the better their reading ability is.This paper consists of five chapters.Chapter One mainly introduces the research background,the research significance,the research purpose and the organization of the thesis.Chapter Two provides a related literature review at home and abroad on the previous studies of language sense,lexical chunks and lexical chunks identification in reading,in which it outlines concepts.These concepts include the definition of lexical chunks and language sense,the features of language sense and the classifications of lexical chunks.Chapter Three introduces the research questions,research subjects,research instrument and research procedures in the experiment.In this chapter,it gives a detailed description concerning how the data are collected and analyzed.Chapter Four analyzes the data collected in the experiment in detail,and discusses the results in answer to the research questions.Chapter Five summarizes the main findings of this study and offer some enlightenment to English learning and teaching.In this chapter,it also points out some limitations of this study and puts forward some suggestions for future research.