An Action Research On Lexical Chunks In Listening Teaching Of Junior English

As an important way of language input,listening is the basis for the development of other language skills.Therefore,listening plays an important role in English learning.New English Curriculum Standards emphasizes and pays attention to the cultivation of students’ English listening ability.However,in the practical teaching of English listening,most junior middle school English teachers tend to use the form of listening test.They often use the listening materials and exercises in the textbooks to test the students’ listening comprehensive ability,but ignore the training of students’ listening comprehensive skills.As a result,many students are lack of guidance on listening strategies,so that their good listening habits have not been formed,and their listening comprehensive ability is relatively low.For the listening comprehensive process,the prerequisite is short-term memory.But short-term memory has the defect of small capacity.This requires students to have a certain mastery of listening strategies and integrate a large amount of available information into a small number of chunks.Lexical chunk is to master multiple words or even a sentence as a whole,which can greatly increase the capacity of short-term memory and improve the listening comprehensive efficiency.In view of this,this study intends to start from the action research,taking junior middle school students as the main subject,to infiltrate lexical chunks into junior middle school English listening teaching,in order to improve junior middle school students’ English listening comprehensive ability.The subjects of this study are 35 students in a junior high school in Changchun.The research tools used are questionnaire,test,interview and teachers’ teaching reflection diary.This study aims to solve the following two problems:(1)the situation of students’ listening habits and comprehensive ability before using lexical chunks in listening teaching;(2)the influence of the use of lexical chunks in listening teaching to students’ listening habits and comprehensive ability.In this study,qualitative and quantitative research methods are used to explore the answers to research questions.The results show that:(1)Before the application of lexical chunk teaching method in English listening teaching,most of the students’ listening habits andlistening comprehension are not ideal and need to be improved.(2)After the application of lexical chunk teaching method in listening teaching,students have more recognition,more interest and significant results in listening improvement.Specifically,applying lexical chunks to English listening teaching and learning can help most of the students form good listening habits,such as cultivating the consciousness of lexical chunks,receiving information in the unit of lexical chunks and comprehending long sentence with the help of lexical chunks in the process of listening.(2)After collecting and analyzing the data of pre-test and post-test,the results show that lexical chunks-based English listening teaching and learning method can improve students’ listening comprehensive ability.Based on the above conclusion,the following enlightening suggestions are put forward in this study.Firstly,teachers should improve students’ awareness of lexical chunks and help them shift their attention from single words to lexical chunks.Secondly,English listening teaching based on lexical chunks can be widely used in listening class.Thirdly,because the lexical chunks in listening materials are limited,students should be encouraged to apply lexical chunks to other parts of English learning,such as vocabulary learning and reading comprehension.Finally,teachers must do research while teaching in the long process of action research.