Application Of Lexical Chunks In English Writing Teaching Of Junior Middle Schools

English writing is a kind of output skill of written language, which plays a crucial role in English teaching of junior middle school. New English Curriculum Standards points out:Junior middle school graduates can collect and prepare material according to writing requirements, then draft essays and messages, etc, independently, and modify their compositions under the guidance of teachers, use common conjunctions to express relations of order and logic, make a brief description of a person’s characters or events.... However, the current English writing teaching situation of junior middle school is not optimistic. From the long-term of the junior middle school English teaching practice, the author found, many students had learned English for many years, and memorized a lot of words, phrases and grammar knowledge, but when applying to the composition, they often did not know how to express their ideas and made many a mistake, furthermore, and could not write an accurate coherent composition. In short, how to write an English composition is not easy for junior middle school students without making grammatical mistakes as far as possible and using vocabularies and phrases learned naturally and appropriately. How to turn around this time-consuming and inefficient situation and effectively solve the problem of junior middle school students’ English writing should be worth our English teachers’ attention and thinking.In recent years, under the background of the application-centered foreign language teaching, people have begun to pay close attention to a new teaching theory-----Lexical Chunks Theory. The main theoretical principle is that language is composed of the grammatical vocabulary, not of the words of grammar. Some scholars pointed out that there was a positive correlation between the lexical chunks and the second language learning. English writing is one of the four basic language skills. Based on the theory, the author holds that there is also a positive correlation between the lexical chunks and writing. However, research for whether lexical chunks can be used in junior middle school English writing teaching to improve students’ English writing level is still in limited amount, and related empirical research is even far from enough. The author supposes that if we apply the theory to English writing teaching and establish English writing teaching method with lexical chunks as the link, we will most likely break the deadlock of separation of language rules and forms as well as meaning in current English teaching, and open a new way for the English writing teaching.In order to improve the students’ writing ability in Wuwei city, the author experimented with students of Grade8of two junior middle schools, and tried to apply Lexical Chunks Theory to English writing teaching. After one-term teaching experiment, through comparing between students’English writing scores of the four classes, two experimental classes and two control classes, and using SPSS for data analysis and discussion of the results, different teaching methods produced different influences on the results of students’ English writing, and the paper also explored the relevance between the use of lexical chunks and English writing level. Through quantitative analysis of the data of the experimental class and the control class, he summed up the conclusions:①after the experiment, the scores of the students’ English compositions of the experimental class were obviously improved, which indicated the experiment had a positive effect on improving the students’ compositions;②after the experiment, the number and the frequency of using lexical chunks of the experimental class students were obviously increased, which indicated that the teaching of lexical chunks made the students increase the use of language chunks. There was a certain correlation between the improvement of students’ compositions and the number of using lexical chunks.In addition, the author used the questionnaire and interview in this experiment. Based on Wen Qiufang’s questionnaire, he designed eight questions to test experimental class students’ attitudes towards English writing, and explored whether the students’ attitudes changed before and after the experiment. From the changing data of the table, he found that experimental class students’ attitudes to English writing had changed significantly. Before the experiment, the students were not very interested in English writing; and though they were not very satisfied with their English compositions, and they lacked confidences in improving writing. The purpose of the students’ writing was also mainly for tests and completing the requirements of the parents. The introduction to lexical chunks could make up for these disadvantages to some extent. The teacher combined the traditional teaching method with the teaching method of lexical chunks in the composition class, and increased the fun of writing, thus the writing was no longer so boring as before. This showed that students’ enthusiasms, initiatives and interests of English writing were raised, and the corresponding scores of their writings would also be better and better. From the student’s interview, he realized that the students did not like the English compositions very much. The main reason was that they thought the writing was more difficult and the skills were not easy to master. The cause of losing the scores of the compositions was collocation of words generally, English version of Chinese expression and lack of contents and so on. Next, he interviewed several teachers, based on which, he found that teachers paid little attention to students’ English compositions. They seldom spent time on explanation and analysis of content, structure and organization of students’ compositions in class, and seldom used the lexical chunks either. Along with the deepening of the teaching reform, the demands of upgradation of junior middle school students’ compositions were higher and higher. Teachers also wanted to improve students’ English writing, but the real teaching method to improve the level of composition of the students was not in progress because of their ability and limitation of the class hours and diversity of learning contents and other reasons.Finally, it should be pointed out that the limitations of the study are quite obvious.①The experimental period of this research was shorter, which only lasted a semester.②Due to the limit of the author’ task allocation, the objects of the research were confined to four classes in Wuwei, two classes in Tianzhu, and two classes in Liangzhou, so the samples were in small number, especially caused a certain limitation for qualitative analysis of the sample compositions.③The questionnaire used for the study was referred to other researches. Whether it was completely suitable for the study and whether it can be transferred to other studies also need follow-up exploration and research.