The Application Of Lexical Chunk Approach To Teaching English Writing In Senior High School

The Lexical Approach is proposed by the English linguist Michael Lewis, who has studied the present condition of English teaching as a foreign language closely. The Lexical Approach is the result of the re-consideration of the nature of language and some other basic linguistic notions. Since its publication, the Lexical Approach has aroused heated discussion and wide attention. Based on the research of lexical approach at home and abroad, the author tries to study the lexical approach from a specific perspective, aim to increase student's writing proficiency, in order to find out an appropriate way to integrate the lexical approach into English writing.Lewis insists that his lexical approach is not simply a shift from grammar to vocabulary teaching, as language consists not of traditional grammar but often of multi-word prefabricated chunks (Lewis 1997). He has written two books Lexical Approach and Implementing the Lexical Approach. Putting Theory into practice which is about how to apply lexical items into language teaching.The present traditional methods for teaching writing leads to the results that students cannot produce a good composition after learning a large number of words, phrases and organization of writing. To change the situation, this study is conducted, aiming to show that the lexical chunk approach will be better in quantity and variety to strengthen students'lexicon and accordingly improve their writing proficiency.Two natural classes in No.90 Middle School in Tianjin, one is the experimental Group (EG), the other one is the control group (CG) were involved in this study. EG was applied to the knowledge of lexical approach. At the beginning and end of the experiment, the two groups were required to finish writing a composition with the same topic at the same time, and then the compositions were scored. And the data were collected and put into the computer for statistics.Results of the writing tests show that students in EG have improved greatly in writing after the lexical chunk approach was employed, especially in accuracy. Results of the questionnaire also show that the lexical chunk approach has been accepted by students as efficient learning strategies.