The Application Of The Task-driven Chunks Approach To English Vocabulary Teaching In Primary School

Primary English teaching is the enlightenment of English learning. Vocabulary is a key element to evaluate students’ level of English for there is not much grammar related in primary school. It is known that most teachers adopt word-and-grammar oriented vocabulary teaching method, which neglects learning strategies. Under this kind of teaching and learning method,although many students spend a lot of time in memorizing words, they cannot remember them well and practice them with ease in daily life. The polarization is becoming more and more serious when the students are in Grade Five.The methods of Lexical Chunks and Task-based Language Teaching Method (TBLT) have been the hot topics in the research of English teaching. And much research has been done to prove that these two teaching methods are effective. But there is rare research about implementing lexical chunks to primary school students or combing these two teaching methods together. Thus,this research is to do an empirical study on task-driven chunks approach in primary school English vocabulary teaching to find out that the task-driven chunks approach can help students to enlarge their vocabulary and arouse their interest in English learning. The task-driven chunks approach is a kind of teaching method to ask the students to finish tasks by using lexical chunks in the learning process. And the questions of the study are as follows:Question 1: In what way will the task-driven chunks approach help students develop their vocabulary?Question 2: In what way will the task-driven chunks approach do a favor to raise students’interest and confidence in English learning?From August, 2016 to January, 2017, the author put the experiment into effect in a certain primary school in Tianjin. During this period, the task-driven chunks approach was used in the EC.The pretests, post-tests, a questionnaire survey and an interview were used as the instruments and SPSS 16.0 was also used in the data analysis.The results of the experiment prove that the task-driven chunks approach does a favor to improve students’ vocabulary ability from the aspects of the depth of vocabulary and the breadth of vocabulary. What’s more, the subjects’ interest and confidence are also improved which can be seen from the questionnaire. The author expects that the findings of this study can contribute to the teaching and learning of English in primary school theoretically and practically.