An Empirical Study Of Application Of Lexical Chunk Approach To Teaching English Writing At High School

Writing is a difficult but crucial part for second language learning. There's correlation between writing and other language skills, such as speaking, listening, reading, and translation. As is proved that there are numerous fixed or semi-fixed language structures in language, called lexical chunks, which can speed up information processing, and play an important role in both language input and output. So many researchers have conducted studies on the validity of lexical approach applied in writing teaching. However, few made studies on Senior high school students, who are poor in vocabulary storage, grammar, lexical chunk learning strategies, often thinking in Chinese logic. In short, their writing performances are far from satisfactory. Based on the situations, the study attempts to demonstrate the feasibility of application of lexical approach to writing teaching theoretically from the perspectives of Psychological Linguistics, SLA and information processing by analyzing the requirements of NECS, learners'current situations of writing teaching and learning, and characteristics of lexical chunks in teaching materials. Moreover, in empirical study, based on SBI (Strategy-Based-instruction) proposed by Cohen(1998), cognitive strategies and meta-cognitive strategies are embedded into lexical chunk approach to design explicit teaching procedures which are topic-related.Senior One students from two natural classes are selected as participants, one of which is treated as experimental group while the other one is considered to be controlled group. The former is taught by lexical chunk approach aiming at improve learners' ability in identifying, storing, and applying lexical chunks, whereas the latter is still taught by traditional approach. The purpose is to testify the correlation between lexical chunk application and writing ability, attempting to explore the following three questions:(1)What are the functions of lexical chunk approach for developing students' writing ability?(2)On which aspects does lexical chunk approach improve students' writing ability?(3)How to enhance students' writing ability by applying lexical chunk approach?Through one-term experiment in the way of writing tests, questionnaires, and interviews, findings to the research questions can be concluded as follows.(1)Lexical chunk approach is of effectiveness and importance to improve learners' writing ability.(2)Compared to participants in controlled group, participants in experimental group get advances in correctness, conciseness, and total writing performances.(3)Students are enhanced in their interests, motivation, and confidence on writing by applying lexical chunk approach, with the help of which learners can successfully decrease the amount of grammatical errors and avoid the transfer from mother language. Besides, there exists positive correlation between the number of lexical chunk adoption and the writing performances. That is, lexical chunks applications are predictive to writing performances, which serve as a vital factor contributing to a good writing but not the only factor, helping learners achieve native-like expression.