An Empirical Study On The Effectiveness Of Language Chunk Recitation On Senior High School Students’ English Writing

With the gradual strengthening of globalization, English, which is treated as an international communicating tool, has become more and more prominent. It has been many years since English became a compulsory course in middle school. Both the English New Curriculum and National College Entrance Examination give high requirements on the levels of wring. However, the writing of students in senior high school are far from satisfaction. There are many problems existing in their writing such as misused expressions, grammar mistakes, poor coherence and so on. In this situation, researchers are trying to find out approaches to improve students’ writing.Language chunks, which are made of more than one words, are the combinations of semantic, context and syntax. They are considered as the smallest units of communication and they are stored and retrieved as a whole. When people use language chunks in their communication, they don’t need to consider vocabulary selection, grammar, collocation and so on. Therefore, language chunks can make students’ wring more accurate, fluent, and coherent and relieve students’ pressure in writing. Current language chunks researches mainly focus on the college English, and the research concerning senior high school English teaching are less. Recitation, which has many advantages such as increase students’ language sense, is a commonly used teaching method in China. This thesis try to combine recitation and language chunk theory to find a new way to improve students’ writing. This research puts up the following research questions: 1.Can students improve their writing ability by reciting language chunks? If the answer is yes, what’s the effect on their writing with the respect of vocabulary, sentence structure, and the coherence of the discourse? 2. What’s the students’ attitude towards language chunk recitation?In order to find the answers to the research questions, more than three months teaching experiment were carried out in two classes in a high school in Guiyang. In the experiment group, the teacher guided students to select and sort language chunks appearing in their studying material and then urged students to recite the language chunks select by themselves. In the control group, the teacher didn’t give the students any ideas about language chunk. Moreover, this research surveyed students’ attitudes about language chunk recitation by questionnaire and interview.The results demonstrate that students can improve their writing ability by language chunk recitation. Students’ writing performance in experiment group are better than control group and their writing performance before the experiment. Students’ in experiment group can use more language chunks in their writing than control group. The result of questionnaire and interview shows that most students thinklanguage chunk recitation is a good way to improve their writing ability and some of them would like to carry out language chunk in their future study while some students think it is useful but painstaking. Although this thesis gives some implications for English writing in high school, there are some limitations existing in this research and they are pointed at the end of this thesis.