A Lexical Trunk Approach to the Teaching of English for Science and Technology Reading

Reading is widely accepted as an effective way for EST learners to obtain information and knowledge, but most EST learners in China find that their reading competence is not satisfactory although they have a large size of EST vocabulary and study English grammar well. So how to improve EST learner’s reading competence remains a problem urgent to settle for EST teachers and researchers. Lexical trunk approach has been widely applied to teaching written discourse and spoken discourse, and a lot of achievements have been made. And we made investigation into the application of lexical trunk approach to the teaching of EST reading and concluded that lexical trunk approach is very helpful to teaching EST reading. In order to improve EST students’ reading competence and enhance the teaching efficiency, teachers should strengthen students’ ability to use lexical trunks in EST reading class and it is of critical importance for EST teachers to adopt appropriate strategies and work out scientific class design from the perspective of lexical