A Study Of The Effectiveness Of Teaching Lexical Chunks In Writing Class In Senior High Schools

Writing is one of the indispensable components of language skills. An adequate vocabulary is needed if learners want to develop and express their ideas in their writing. So vocabulary acquisition is of critical importance in language learning. However, in English teaching, the teachers often pay less attention to vocabulary teaching skills and learning strategies. As a result, the students have some difficulty in learning, especially in both input and output language. Some students spend much time on English but gain a little; they do not know how to organize sentences and express their ideas properly in writing because of lack in profound understanding of vocabulary connotation. According to the characteristics and the advantages of lexical chunks, the author conducts an experiment and analyzes the students' errors and their causes arising from English writing. This paper is based on the theories of contrastive analysis and error analysis in the second language acquisition (SLA) and further probes into the feasibility of teaching lexical chunks in English writing. In the experiment, the author gave lessons to the experimental group by means of teaching lexical chunks while to the control group in a traditional vocabulary teaching method. By comparison and analysis, the findings indicate that the effectiveness of teaching lexical chunks is significant. Or rather, it can help the students make fewer grammatical mistakes in their English writing, and in the meantime it is better for senior high school students to improve their English performance and competence, especially the students' ability in writing.