The Effects of Teaching Lexical Bundles on Improving Reading ability of High School Students

The aims of the present study are to examine the effectiveness of lexical bundle learning and teaching on reading comprehension, and to investigate how to teach them in an effective way when high school students read textbooks. In addition, this study investigates the perceptions of high school students on confidence, interest, self-directed study in reading classes. Twenty-five 10 grade high school students in K High School located in Gangjin participated in the study. They were instructed lexical bundles in a given English textbook during the reading classes for six weeks. The learners were encouraged to look upon lexis as lexical bundles rather than discrete single words and to figure out their meanings and use in contexts. A list of lexical bundles from the English textbook for the 10 grade high school students was selected through the N-gram, which is one of concordance programs for the statistical analysis of lexical bundles. In an attempt to examine the changes in the students’ cognitive and affective domains, three tests (pre-test, middle test, and post-test) and two questionnaires (pre-and post-questionnaire) were administered. The major findings and pedagogical implications are as follows: First, the results of the questionnaires showed that the students’ recognition of lexical bundles was raised, and they noticed a series of consecutive word units, which frequently appeared in the texts, as a lexical bundle. Also, they realized how lexical bundles were combined and understood the structures of phrases and sentences, as chunks not as isolated individual words. Second, when it comes to the learners’ cognitive domain, the lexical bundle-centered reading classes had a meaningful effect on their reading comprehension in the middle and post achievement tests. The tests also indicated that both lower and higher proficiency levels of the students were significantly influenced. It is conjectured that they figured out the main idea and overall context in the reading texts better by comprehending the lexis as meaningful lexical bundles rather than focusing on the single words. Last, as for the affective domain, it showed a meaningful effect on the learners’interest, confidence, self-directed learning attitude towards English learning. Also, they showed positive responses in the open-ended questions and indepth interviews, hoping more lexical bundle learning in the future. In conclusion, these results suggest that the lexical bundle learning has valuable effects on enhancing reading comprehension, and it is also useful for learners’language competence and integrative language learning. Namely, it is essential that lexical bundle-centered learning for reading should be widely introduced to encourage leaners to recognize isolated words as a lexical bundle and internalize them as authentic expressions.