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Studying a word list may be the most popular for middle school students among a wide range of vocabulary learning strategies. But a word list may be dangerous, the word list just tell us the word class, meaning of each word, more or less there are a few derivatives. There is no doubt that it is more difficult to put words together to form collocations, if they are informed of a scientific and effective way of learning vocabulary. This essay will also help to raise students’ chunking awareness.
Middle school students are requested to grasp large numbers of vocabulary. And it even becomes a great pain to recite new words for many middle school students. Stiff ways of just remember one by one to recite new words are not very effective. Students can not acknowledge the words well, as well as the phrases, sentences or grammatical rules, as a result, they fail in tests. Many students have to be underachievers in English. All of these are bad for children’s development.
Recently lexical chunk has gained more and more attention in linguistic area. Researchers find we must consider lexical chunks in vocabulary teaching and learning. The purpose of this paper is to do some practical research on the application of lexical chunks approach in middle school English teaching. Based on the problems in the current vocabulary teaching and learning in middle schools. This paper probes into the correlation of the lexical chunk instruction and increasing students' integrated language skills.
2. Literature Review
We must mention Lewis if we talk about “chunking” vocabulary teaching and learning approach nowadays, whose controversial ideas have had a great effect on the English language teaching world. In this paper, I do not intend to offer a complete review of his work, but I will involve in some of his contributions that can be properly used in the classroom.
In his work The Lexical Approach, Lewis (1993) argues that it is easy to find that more and more languages consist of large numbers of chunks, in the utterances of native speakers. Advanced computer-based studies have given great support to the views of The Lexical Approach recently. The analysis of the study has brought distensible lexical patterning by confirming that native speakers absorb large numbers of “multi-word unit” when using the language.
The versions of these “ready-to-go” chunks are out of our imagination, for instance, “lexical items”, “multi-word units”, “lexical phrases” and etc. However, no matter how to be marked, these chunks are of great importance not only in language teaching but also in language acquisition.
To make a helpful summary, Lewis worked hard on first language acquisition researches which related to second or foreign language learning：(1) Learning single sounds, structures and combining them can not lead to a better grasp, instead, increasing the ability of providing wholes into parts is an effective method. (2)Grammatical rules can be acquired by observing，presuming and experimenting. (3)Whole phrases can be used without understanding their compositions．(4)Acquisition can be increased by contacting with a resonant partner who has a higher level of competence in the target language．(Lewis, 1993:95)
2.1 Definition of Lexical Chunks
The definition of chunk is always one of research problems for scholars in this field of study. On the one hand, it is difficult to draw the boundary between chunks and non-chunks; on the other hand, a chunk can often be coincident with another chunk or contain another chunk (Hunston, 2002). So there is no certain definition about chunks among scholars.
Since the 1980s, chunks have received more and more attention from many researchers (Natteringer and De Carrico, 1992; Wray, 2002, etc.). However, nobody has given a widely accepted definition about chunks. Different expressions are used by different researchers. Such as lexical patterns or phrases, lexical chunks, lexicalized sentence stems, formulaic sequences and etc. Expressions are different, but these names reflect the integrity on form and the stability on semantic as the same.