An Empirical Study On English Reading Teaching Based On Lexical Chunk Approach In Junior High School

Reading is one of the most important parts in English learning.Good reading ability can promote the students’ comprehensive language ability.In contrast,teachers in junior high schools lack of innovative theories to guide teaching and depend too much on traditional teaching approach,which limits the improvement of the students’ reading ability and the development of reading strategies and skills.So we need to explore the new teaching model of English reading in junior high school.Among them,the approach of lexical chunks has been widely concerned and accepted in recent years.Based on the lexical chunk approach,the researcher selects 130 students from Lvliang Experimental Middle School as the subjects.A four-month teaching experiment is carried out which applies the lexical chunk approach to the junior high school English teaching to find out the answers to the two questions.One is that what are the effects of the lexical chunk approach on junior high school students’ English reading strategies and reading habits.The other is what are the influences of the lexical chunk approach on English reading comprehensive ability of junior high school students?In the experiment,the lexical chunk approach is used in reading teaching in experimental class while the traditional reading teaching method is adopted in control class.The researcher collected and analyzes the results of the two tests after the experiment to compare the differences of the reading ability development between the students in the two classes.The post-questionnaire and an interview are also carried out to check the features of the students’ reading strategies and reading habits.The results shows that the lexical chunk approach has positive effects on both students’ reading strategies and reading habits.A majority number of the students’ reading strategies develops,such as: skimming,scanning and they learn to infer the meaning of the new words and analyze the causal and logical relationships of the paragraphs or sentences according to the context in reading based on the approach of lexical chunk.Students’ reading habits improve significantly for they can consciously pay attention to different tenses and the collocations of various verbs in sentences.Moreover,it can be seen from the comparative analysis of the results of the tests that the students’ reading scores increases distinctly.Therefore,the lexical chunk approach is an effective teaching method and it can be applied to reading in the future teaching continually.The experiment verifies the effects of the lexical chunk approach and shows that more after-class activities of lexical chunks should be provided to enhance students’ lexical chunk ability.What’s more,the teacher should increase their own professional theoretical knowledge of English,using advanced teaching methods to guide teaching.