The Application Of Lexical Chunk Teaching Method To English Reading Teaching In Junior Middle School

Generally speaking,four basic skills which are listening,speaking,reading and writing should be mastered by English learners.Among these skills,the cultivation of reading ability is very important.Reading is an important accessible channel of knowledge and lays a foundation for the application of English knowledge.However,in the process of traditional English reading teaching,teachers often pay too much attention to English reading teaching and choose to explain reading materials word by word.The general process of English reading teaching is as follows: the explanation of words,the memorization of words,the review of words before class,leading-in,the skimming of reading materials,the intensive reading about reading materials,the explanation of grammar rules,relevant exercises,summary of key words and grammar.In this way,this traditional teaching mode not only prolongs the time of an English class and wastes a lot of energy of teachers,but also conveys a wrong idea to students that reciting words and understanding some grammar knowledge are equivalent to mastering English.As a matter of fact,it is found that only by reciting words and grammar rules can not improve the English reading level of students.On the contrary,reciting a lot of boring words and complex grammar rules costs students a lot of energy as well.Such a laborious teaching method brings a lot of troubles to both teachers and students.Therefore,in order to improve students’ English reading level and arouse their interests in English reading,many experts begin to explore the effective teaching methods.Among them,the introduction and application of Lexical Chunk Teaching Method has aroused the author’s interest.In 1993,Lewis put forward Lexical Chunk Teaching Method.He proposed that lexical chunks were composed of several or more words and could be stored and extracted as a whole.Besides,It could effectively reduce the burden of memorization and speed up the processing of language,which is conducive to the input and output of language.Since then,experts and scholars in the field of education have tried to put this teaching method into practice,and indeed achieved corresponding teaching results.However,most of the objects of these teaching experiments are college students and students in senior high school.There are relatively few teaching experiments on students in junior middle school.At the same time,these researches mostly involve the application of Lexical Chunk Teaching Method in oral English class,English writing class and English vocabulary class,while the researches on the application of Lexical Chunk Teaching Method in English reading class are relatively less.Based on this,this paper attempts to study the application of Lexical Chunk Teaching Method to English reading teaching in junior middle school,trying to explore the following issues:1.What are the effects of Lexical Chunk Teaching Method on students’ English reading autonomy?2.What are the specific effects of Lexical Chunk Teaching Method on students’ English reading scores?In this paper,questionnaires,tests and an interview are used to verify the above questions.The author takes the students of two parallel classes in Grade Eight of Xincai Qiushi School as the experimental object and a four-month teaching experiment is conducted in the two classes.The Lexical Chunk Teaching Method is adopted in the experimental class(Class 1),while the traditional teaching method is adopted in the control class(Class 6).In this study,two questionnaires,two tests and an interview are conducted successively.In order to understand the autonomous learning of students existing in junior English reading class,pre-questionnaire and post-questionnaire are conducted in the students of the two classes before the teaching experiment and after the teaching experiment respectively.In order to explore the specific effects of Lexical Chunk Teaching Method in English reading scores of the student in junior middle school,two tests are conducted in the students of the two classes.At the end of each test,the data are collected and analyzed by the author.Before the teaching experiment,a pre-test is conducted in the two classes.After that,in order to get the real feedback from the students toward the Lexical Chunk Teaching Method,the author takes an interview with the students in the experimental class.The interview focuses on the changes of their interest in English reading,their real feeling about Lexical Chunk Teaching Method,their discussion on the advantages and disadvantages of this teaching method and their own suggestions for the English reading teaching in the future.After the analysis of the data of questionnaires,tests and interview,the conclusion can be described as follows: Before the teaching experiment,most of the students in both classes do not understand the importance of English reading well,their interests in English reading is not deep,and their confidence in learning English is not enough;In addition,most of the students do not have the consciousness of accumulating knowledge and the habit of accumulating phrases and sentence patterns.This means that students’ learning autonomy has not reached the requirements of teaching objectives.These problems have been dealt with properly under the guidance of the Lexical Chunk Teaching Method.Their learning confidence have been improved,more and more students have developed their interests in English reading.In addition,most of them have formed the good habits of lexical chunks accumulation.In a word,their learning autonomy have been improved.The results of data analysis show that the English reading scores of the students in the experimental class have been significantly improved,while the English reading scores of the students in the control class have not been greatly improved.What’s more,Under the guidance of Lexical Chunk Teaching Method,the students’ scores of meaning guessing questions,details judgment questions and main idea questions have been significantly improved.However,the improvement effect of students’ inference questions under the guidance of Lexical Chunk Teaching Method is not as good as that of traditional teaching method.Therefore,the conclusion can be summarized as follows: All in all,compared with the traditional teaching method,the reading scores can be improved significantly under the guidance of Lexical Chunk Teaching Method.Of course,there are some shortcomings of this teaching method.After the interview among these students in EC,their views about this new teaching method are as follows: In the first stage of the implementation of Lexical Chunk Teaching Method,the students need to spend a long time learning the concept and classification of lexical chunks.Secondly,in the process of forming the habit of accumulating lexical chunks,it is necessary for the students to review and use these learnt lexical chunks unremittingly,and finally achieve the effect of internalizing lexical chunks,which is a great challenge for the students with weak will and weak English foundation.Besides,the promotion effect of inference judgment questions is not as good as that under the guidance of traditional teaching method.Therefore,This research brings the following inspirations to the future English reading teaching.(1)Teachers should gradually cultivate students’ awareness of lexical chunks,and guide them to form a good habit of lexical chunk accumulation,so as to lay a good foundation for English reading learning in the future.(2)In order to improve students’ English reading level,teachers should combine Lexical Chunk Teaching Method with traditional teaching method,and formulate various learning plans in accordance with learning situation.