Chapter One Introduction

1.1 The background of the research

In our daily traditional vocabulary teaching pattern, teachers and students dealwith vocabulary grammatically, as a result, it is not uncommon that many studentshave ever consumed a lot of time to memorize vocabulary, but they achieve little inusing vocabulary. The literal form and spelling of lexis have long been committed inmemory, but practical getting together of the isolated words in spoken or writtenform is really a big headache to language users, even such terrible cases as blankbrain or lexis misuse, vocabulary abuse and some else problems will turn up in life.Linguist Wallace (1982) pointed out, in English vocabulary teaching there exists thefollowing four issues: ①failure to search the required vocabulary in using; ②failureto choosing appropriate vocabulary in using; ③failure to choosing propervocabulary in using; ④ the use of vocabulary does not comply with the idiomaticrule.The above cases in practice can be attributed to the accumulation of Englishvocabulary, because these students have not formed lexical chunk in their mind, theprocess of rote memorizing separates the organic association between words,ignoring the coherence between lexical chunks. Therefore, in their memory, Englishwords are just like a mess difficult to get together.However, contemporary corpus studies have shown that the form of the wordand its meaning are closely linked, and the syntax and lexicon are interacted, whichis mainly reflected in two aspects of vocabulary: colligation and collocation. Basedon this feature of vocabulary, the concept of lexical chunk (word block) is proposed.

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1.2 The significance of the research

It is true that vocabulary functions as the essential part of language and plays akey part in foreign language teaching and learning. However, in many China’s highschools, vocabulary teaching has not been given its duly attention. On the other hand,compared with vocabulary teaching, grammar teaching did play the core role ofEnglish teaching and it has been dominant in English teaching for long ages. Withthe higher vocabulary power and more harsh corresponding requirements accordingto the newly-issued NSECC(New Senior English Curriculum Criterion,2003) ，vocabulary learning was often considered to be time-killing but ineffective thereforeit has been an urgent problem to be solved. From the harsh fact we students face wecan understand it is necessary and urgent for both teachers and students to get aneffective and efficient way of vocabulary acquisition.Vocabulary is generally deemed as the basis of language. It can be understoodthat keeping adequate vocabulary is crucial to learn well a language. Linguists andlanguage workers come to understand the significance of vocabulary in languageteaching until the 1980s. According to recent research from corpus and languageacquisition , in natural language processing, obviously there are a great number ofprefabricated lexical chunks. According to Bolinger, Words are stored in brain notonly as individual morphemes, but as parts of expressions, or as longer chunks ofspeech, and all of them are usually retrieved from memory in the pre-assemblingchunks.

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Chapter Two Literature Review

2.1 Related studies on the Lexical Chunk’s Approach

The research tradition of prefabricated lexical chunks in modern linguistics canbe dated back to Palmer(1925),who held the view that memorizing well the largestnumber of common and very useful word groups ought to be the most fundamentalguiding principle for those learners who are eager to be proficient in foreigncommunication. Famous J.R.Firth, the founder of London School of Linguistics, putforward the concept of collocation in linguistics in the 1950s, which laid a solidfoundation for the research of the prefabricated lexical chunks nature of language.In terms of memory research, Miller(1956)and Bolinger(1975) both found thatthe human memory system stores a quite constant number of units in multipleforms，consisting of longer memorized chunks of speech. As they said all these couldbe retrieved from memory as a whole, therefore facilitating ongoing real-timelanguage practice. Becker (1975) ever suggested that phrases such as let alone, somuch for and as well as, cannot easily be ignored. He demanded the systematictreatment of the large class of idiosyncratic phases.

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2.2 Theoretical studies concerned with lexical chunks

The basic prerequisition of neurofunctional theory is that there does exist aconnection between language functions and the corresponding neural anatomy. Inorder to own a good knowledge of the connection, it is quite necessary for us to befamiliar to our neural structure first.It has been well known from the scientific study that our brain is divided intotwo parts: one area is the right hemisphere and the other is the left hemisphere(known in particular as Wemicke’s and Broca’s areas). The function of righthemisphere is generally associated with holistic processing, as is opposed to serial oranalytic processing, which does exist in the left hemisphere.The lexical chunks may be associated with the right hemisphere of human brain,which is usually viewed to involve holistic processing (Selinger 1982). That is tosay, the learner subjugates the individual parts of what makes up all entity to thewhole. The learners can perceive the whole pattern as a gestalt rather than theelements that constitute it. In the case of lexical chunks, thus the learner may have astrategy of pattern memorization. He attends to language input and, usingmechanisms situated in the right hemisphere, identifies a great number of commonlyoccurring whole utterances in terms of the contexts in which they are used. Thecognitive patterns are stored in the right hemisphere and are available for immediateprocessing in production and reception. Pattern imitation is the behavioral equivalentof pattern memorization. Selinger(1982) considers that pattern imitation is linked toconcerns the right hemisphere functions.

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Chapter Three Theoretical Basis.......16

3.1 Lexical Chunk’sApproach....16

3.2 Lexical chunks.....20

3.3 Conventional means for lexical cognition.... 25

Chapter Four Application of Theory into Practice....28

4.1 Research questions....28

4.2 Subjects..........28

4.3 Instruments....29

4.4 Reliability......30

4.5 Procedures..... 30

4.6 Data Collection....31

4.7 Teaching in the control group......31

4.8 Teaching in the experimental group........32

4.9 Example of teaching by means of the lexical chunk’s approach......35

Chapter Five Results and Discussion......38

5.1 Pre-test...........38

5.2 Results of the data from Questionnaire I on students’vocabulary learning.......40

5.3 Post-test......... 44

5.4 Pedagogical implications.......48

5.5 Some key points to focus in implementing the lexical chunk’s approach....49

Chapter Five Results and Discussion

This is an important part of the thesis, where we will get down to the detailedanalysis of the involved investigations．In the first task, we aim to discover thoseproblems high school students have in acquiring vocabulary and those troubles onvocabulary acquiring strategies. In the second task, we aim to solve the secondquestion what the relationship between lexical chunk’s approach and vocabularyteaching is. In the third task, we aim to find the answer to whether lexical chunk’sapproach work in language teaching and help to promote the overall lexicalcompetence of high school students. After the test, 57 papers were collected. Just as table 1 shows, themean of the experimental group is 97.7931while the mean of the control group is95.9286. The difference of the mean between the two group is 1.8645. From the datawe can find that there exist only small differences between the experimental groupand the control group whether in terms of means or in terms of the Std．Deviation.．It can be inferred that students’ overall lexical competence in the two groups arealmost equal before the experiment.

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Conclusion

My experimental study centers on the effect of the lexical chunk’s approach inhigh school English vocabulary teaching. The experimental study is meant tospecially make explorations on the following two research questions：1) Can application of lexical chunk’s approach in classroom teaching helpstudents to raise their lexical competence?2) Can application of lexical chunk’s approach in classroom teaching promotestudents’interest and strategies in lexical learning?From the questionnaire, we can see that the main problem of the high schoolstudents in vocabulary learning is a lack of vocabulary learning strategies. Thelearning strategies (O'Malley and Chamot 1989; Carrell, Pharis LIBERTO 1989)have demonstrated that the use of certain strategies can promote language learningand make learners more self-reliant in their learning activities. Once students havemastered the appropriate learning strategies, their learning will become interestingand effective to great content. From the questionnaire, the students seemed to haveno effective way to acquire vocabulary. Therefore, it is well worthy of our attentionto focus on vocabulary learning strategies in language teaching and learning. Thelexical chunks are a composite of form and function. When learners store a lot ofchunks in their memory, they can easily retrieve them in practice. Making greatefforts to construct sentences by complex grammatical rules is unnecessary. In theexperiment, students from the experimental group were given instructions on lexicalchunk’s approach in detail and did a lot of exercises on lexical chunks.

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Reference (omitted)