An Empirical Study Of The Effects Of Chunks Instruction On The Writing Performance Of Senior School Students With Different Learning Styles

As one of the important part of English teaching, English writing reflects English proficiency of learners to a large extent. Various English tests at home or abroad involve English writing test. Hence, studies of English Writing Teaching have received tremendous attention in the research of second language teaching. In the past, teachers mainly focused on the recitation of vocabulary and texts. Although this method had certain effect on teaching, it just instructed students to study English words effectively. Students still have many obstacles in their writings. Lexical chunks, as fixed grammatical structures, become more and more popular in English teaching. In the area of second language teaching, Lexical Chunks Teaching(LCT) is an innovative viewpoint, which has pedagogical significance.In addition, the majority of previous studies paid attention to the relationship between language teaching and language competence of Second Language Learners(SLL), with individual differences neglected. Learning styles, as one of the basic factors of individual differences, affect learning performance of SLL. Field Dependence(FD)/ Field Independence(FI), with stable features, are different cognitive styles of SLL‘s learning styles. This research tries to explore the effect of LCT on writing performance of students with FD/FI cognitive styles on the basis of previous researches.Senior school students have a size of vocabulary, but their improvement of writing abilities mainly benefit from classroom instructions. Usually, they are interested in learning new things, and therefore, they are willing to accept LCT. Furthermore, being in the stage of preparing for National Matriculation English Test(NMET), they have passion for study. From the above, the experiment would be conducted effectively among senior school students.This thesis tries to apply theories of lexical chunks to senior school English teaching and puts forward three related research questions.(1) What are the characteristics of lexical chunks the participants use in their English writing?(2) Dose LCT has significant effects on the use of lexical chunks by the participants?(3) Are the different learning styles correlated with the use of lexical chunks?The participants were 33 Senior Students from Handan No. 4 High School in Hebei Province. Before the experiment, the author carried out an Embedded Figures Test(EFT) which divided them into FD Group and FI Group. In the experiment, three tests were administrated before the teaching activity(pre-test), immediately after the teaching session(middle-test) and four weeks later(post-test). During the period, the author served as the provisional English teacher. The pre-test was conducted to examine the use of lexical chunks of FD/FI learners before the teaching activity; the middle-test was conducted to examine FD/FI Groups‘ effect of lexical chunks learning; and the post-test was administrated to examine the use of lexical chunks after LCT four weeks later. After the experiment, the author conducted a semi-structured interview among them, aiming to know about their attitudes towards LCT.With Software SPSS19.0, the author made an analysis of the data and found out: first, LCT had positive effect on students‘ writing performance and increased the number of lexical chunks in their writings significantly. The post-test indicated that students would forget the use of lexical chunks without continuous LCT. Second, there was no correlation between the FD/FI cognitive styles of senior school students and the number of lexical chunks in their writings, nor was there significant difference between FD and FI. Third, lexical chunks that they had learnt could help them to improve their abilities of English study and English writing. The results indicated that LCT had significant effect on writing performance of FD/FI students. It was necessary for students to acquire lexical chunks for a long time. There were no significant difference between FD students and FI students. Hence, it was necessary for teachers to differentiate FD students from FI students in the process of LCT. However, this thesis had some limitations which should be studied in the future.