An Experimental Study On The Effects Of Lexical Approach On Students’ English Reading Ability In Junior High Schools

Reading is a vital language input way in learning English because during the process of reading,students can not only gain effective information,but also learn language knowledge.According to the New English Curriculum Standard,grade eight English learners need to meet the demands of English reading abilities listed as follows: 1)the ability to find out information from the text;2)the ability to guess word meaning from the text;3)the ability to understand and explain the information from charts;4)the ability to understand different types of reading materials;5)the ability to understand reading material by using English-Chinese dictionary;6)the accumulated amount of reading material up to 100 thousand words.Therefore,junior school students should form a good habit of English reading and master an effective reading method,which can lay a solid foundation for further English study.Nevertheless,at present,a majority of English teachers are still inclined to adopt an English teaching method in which English teachers attach importance to individual words and grammatical rules.As a result,most students are accustomed to reading word by word and sentence by sentence,which can have bad impacts on students’ English reading accuracy and speed.Some students reflect that they can know each word’s meaning in a text but cannot catch the exact meaning of a whole text.One dominate reason is that they do not know an individual word is combined with another to form a kind of fixed phrase with specific and different meanings--lexical chunks.This thesis attempts to probe into the influences of lexical approach on the English reading ability and students’ lexical chunk competence.In this study,two research questions are addressed as follows:(1)Does lexical approach have positive influences on students’ lexical chunk competence in junior high schools?(2)Does lexical approach have positive influences on students’ reading ability in junior high schools?In order to testify the feasibility and effectiveness of English reading based onlexical approach,the thesis adopts the quantitative research method and the qualitative research method.43 students of Class 5 in Grade 2 in Guangzhou No.18 Junior High School participated in the teaching experiment,who were randomly selected as the experimental class and were taught by the author for 12 weeks.The teaching material was their English textbook,published by Shanghai Educational Publishing House.The reading instruction in the experimental class was guided by lexical approach in the whole semester.Software SPSS 22.0 was used to collect and analyze the data from two groups’ statistics.The results of the study suggests that students in the experimental class improved their English reading ability and lexical chunk competence as well.The research provided teachers with a good and effective way for English reading teaching.Therefore,the author concludes that it is feasible and beneficial to apply lexical approach to Chinese junior high school English reading classrooms.