An Empirical Study Of The Prefabricated Chunk Model For Writing Teaching In Senior Middle Schools

English writing is an important part of English teaching in senior middle schools. For a long time, teachers of English and researchers of teaching methodology toiling at ways of improving writing have attempted various approaches from divergent viewpoints and achieved a lot. However, the situation of writing is far from satisfaction. The majority of students cannot complete the task of writing within the time limit. Moreover, some sentences are unidiomatic, even mistaken,The concept of prefabricated chunk presents itself as a promising solution to the crucial problems above. Recent researches by computers have proved that 90% of natural utterances are completed by the semi-fixed "prefabricated chunks" existing between words and fixed phrases (杨玉晨1999). Thus, this thesis, mainly based on the theory of Nattinger & Decarrico (1992), studied the application of prefabricated chunks to English writing through quantitative and qualitative methods, and revealed a clear picture of the use of prefabricated chunks in English writing in Chinese senior middle schools. The author tried to solve the following questions:1) What great difficulty in English writing did students have in senior middle schools? 2) How was students' ability to write in English improved after applying the Prefabricated Chunk Model advocated in this research to writing?3) Which category of prefabricated chunks contributed to English writing most?4) What were the students' attitudes towards this writing model? There were a total of 60 students from Fanggu Senior Middle School,Nanxian, participating in the four and a half months teaching experiment. They were divided into two groups. Group A was the experimental group while Group B was the control group. The subjects in the two groups were similar in writing proficiency. The author applied the Prefabricated Chunk Model to writing teaching in the experimental group, however, adopted the routine English writing teaching in the control group. Before the teaching experiment, the author conducted Questionnaire One to make it clear what great difficulty the students had in English writing; after the experiment, Questionnaire Two was handed out to the subjects in Group A, with the purpose of finding out what attitudes they held towards the writing Model. The results were as follows:1) Students found it very difficult to retrieve words, phrases, sentence patterns learnt before and write appropriately.2) Prefabricated chunks not only helped the students abstract words, phrases, and sentence patterns learnt before rapidly, thus finishing writing in a shorter time, but also facilitated the improvement of students' writing by helping students write appropriately3) Different types of prefabricated chunks had different effects on the improvement of English writing. The fourth kind--sentence builder, was the most helpful to their writing, which was followed by phrasal constraints. And then polywords took the third place, with institutionalized expressions the last.4) The students in Group A thought that the Prefabricated Chunk Model was fit for them, which contributed to the accuracy, fluency and idiomaticity in English writing.