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An Empirical Study on Vocabulary Teaching of College English through Lexical Chunks Approach

Author: ChenYan
Tutor: ZhengAiPing
School: Northwest University of Science and Technology
Course: Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics
Keywords: chunks vocabulary teaching college English
CLC: H319.3
Type: Master's thesis
Year: 2013
Downloads: 30
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Abstract

Vocabulary is the basic material of language, on which people rely to convey information and interact. The process of vocabulary learning is not discontinuous, from the beginning to the end of language learning. Thus, vocabulary teaching plays an important roal. Researchers of EFL proposed that vocabulary reserve of English learners has something to do with their integral level, including listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Because of the teaching need and the deepening of the research theory, vocabulary teaching gets more attention, becoming the key point of language teaching. Meanwhile, in China, English is learned as the second language. So how to promote students’learning efficiency in the limited class time? After consulting mass data, the writer has found that chunk has become the focus of Second Language Acquisition.Because of characteristics of chunks, researchers have conducted some researches on them. Nattinger&DeCarrico(1992) applied the lexical phrases for language teaching, from aspects of teaching spoken discourse and written discourse. Michael Lewis(1993) proposed lexical approach in his book Lexical Chunks Approach. Although some researches have been conducted in China and abroad, most of them principally focus on the teaching advice. Also, a small amount of researches are involved in the steps of actual operation of the class and researches that apply chunks to vocabulary teaching are less. Therefore, the research adopts lexical chunks approach as the main teaching approach to explore specific steps of actual operation of vocabulary teaching and contrasts results of pretest and posttest between experimental class and control class to further confirm this approach. The main question in the study include:1) in the course of college English teaching, compared with the isolated word teaching mode, whether lexical chunks approach is a more ideal mode for vocabulary learning to help students learn better and improve learning efficiency;2) Whether students who learned English vocabulary through chunks could use vocabulary in composition more appropriately, and more native-like.The study lasted fifteen weeks and the experimental methodology was applied. The author takes Students as subjects who come from Northwest Agriculture&Forest University, grade2012, majoring in Agronomy as the control class, and majoring in Protected Agriculture Science and Engineering as the experimental class. At the first stage of the study, questionnaires have been released to investigate students’ learning situation in the experimental class, and pretest was conducted in the experimental class and the control class. At the second stage, the writer explored the vocabulary teaching mode through lexical chunks approach, adopting chunks in the experimental class but traditional methods in the control class. At the third stage, posttest was carried out in the experimental class and the control class, and the author conducted interviews with students from the experimental class. Results of pretest and posttest of these two classes are contrasted and analyzed by SPSS13.0. The results indicate that there is no clear difference between the control class and the experimental class in writing and whole level before the experiment, but grades of writing and posttest of the experimental class are much higher than those of the control class after the experiment. So lexical chunks approach can help students to master vocabulary better. At the same time, all of students who are in an interview believe chunks can be stored as a whole in the brain, identify and retrieve automatically, and make them express their ideas fluently and correctly. So the author gets the conclusion that lexical chunks approach can be regarded as a more perfect vocabulary teaching mode, which can help students apply vocabulary properly in writing.

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CLC: > Language, writing > FOREIGN > English > Language teaching > Teaching method
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