An Empirical Study On Lexical Chunks In Senior High School English Vocabulary Teaching

Nowadays, under the guidance of traditional English teaching methods in senior high school, most students just recite vocabularies and memorize the grammatical rules. It not only seriously impedes students from improving their English but also increases their tiredness of learning. Such phenomenon continues from the primary school to senior high school, attracting wide attention of scholars at home and abroad. Many language specialists have made some relative studies, and they put forward the idea of lexical chunk teaching approach to develop and improve students' lexical chunk abilities.This paper explores the practical effects of applying the lexical chunk approach to English vocabulary teaching in senior high school, so as to improve students' learning interest, and accelerate their efficiency of memorizing words. At the same time, students' ability of using vocabularies together with their reading ability are both enhanced a lot. The questions raised by the author are as follows. What are the difficulties and problems encountered by senior high school students in learning English words? How to use lexical chunk approach in English vocabulary teaching? What influences can be exerted on students' English vocabulary learning under the guidance of lexical chunk approach? The author mainly uses pre-test, post-test and the questionnaire to collect the experimental data. The research subjects are students from Wenchang Middle School of Zhoukou City, Class Ten and Class Eleven in Grade One. It takes five months to complete this teaching experiment. The lexical chunk method will be taken in the experimental class, while in the controlled class, the traditional vocabulary teaching method will be adopted.By the application of lexical chunks method, students' learning attitudes towards English vocabulary have changed greatly and their vocabulary learning methods have been improved in the experimental class. More and more students begin to pay attention to lexical chunks while learning English words, and a majority of students collect the lexical chunks and classify them into different groups. Moreover, they review these lexical chunks timely so as to keep in mind the new words effectively. However, in terms of the vocabulary learning concepts and vocabulary learning strategies, the results are almost the same before and after the two tests in the controlled class.