The Application Of The Lexical Approach To English Vocabulary Teaching In Senior High Schools

Vocabulary plays an important role in senior high schools' English teaching.As the basis of other language activities such as listening,speaking,reading and writing,it is an essential part in language knowledge and is the key to the development of students' language ability.Meanwhile,the new curriculum standard reform has put forward higher requirements for senior high schools students' English vocabulary learning.However,in the actual English vocabulary teaching in senior high schools,students memorize a large number of words passively.Furthermore,they cannot search for the required words in practice,and problems such as inappropriate use of words and improper collocations frequently occur.Under this situation,it is very important to find a more suitable vocabulary teaching method.The lexical approach is a vocabulary teaching approach proposed by Michael Lewis in The Lexical Approach: The State of ELT and a Way Forward published in 1993.Lewis(1993)holds that lexical chunks are the core of language.When language is learned in lexical chunks rather than in isolated individual words,language acquisition is faster.The lexical approach advocates the unification of vocabulary and grammar in teaching,emphasizing the teaching of frequently occurring vocabularies and their core meanings and common collocations.Wray believes that a lexical chunk is a prefabricated multi-word unit with a certain form and meaning.It is stored in memory as a whole,and extracted as a whole when used,without using grammatical rules for analysis.Therefore,it plays an extremely important role in improving students' vocabulary learning efficiency and language output ability.This study applies the lexical approach to senior high schools' English classrooms to explore the feasibility and effectiveness of the lexical approach in senior high schools' English vocabulary teaching,and attempts to answer the following three questions:1.What is the impact of the lexical approach on senior high school students' vocabulary learning strategies?2.What is the influence of the lexical approach on students at different scores respectively?3.How can the lexical approach be applied to senior high schools' English vocabulary teaching effectively?In order to answer the above questions,140 students of two classes from Dengzhou No.1 Senior High School were recruited as the participants of the study.The experimental class was taught with the lexical approach while the traditional vocabulary teaching method was applied in the control class.The period of the whole research lasted for five months(from September 2019 to January 2020).The collected data of the experimental class and the control class were analyzed in SPSS 21.The results are as follows:First of all,the lexical approach has a positive impact on students' vocabulary learning strategies.For example,before the experiment,most of the students mainly recite the isolated words by memorizing word lists,while after the experiment,more than half of the students memorize words through lexical chunks and are able to guess words' meanings through the context.Secondly,through the application of the lexical approach,the scores of students in different grades have been improved,among which the improvement in the excellent group and the failed group is the most obvious.These findings imply that in order to effectively apply the lexical approach to senior high schools' English vocabulary teaching,teachers should guide students to understand the meanings of lexical chunks in combination with specific context,train students to identify,summarize and use lexical chunks according to lexical chunks' function and strengthen the cultivation of students' lexical chunks consciousness.At the same time,teachers should also pay attention to the accumulation of lexical chunks knowledge in teaching and cultivation of sensitivity to lexical chunks.