A Study Of The Impacts Of Lexical Chunks On English Writing In Senior High School

English writing plays an important role in English teaching.But it's difficult for many senior high school students to improve their English writing competence.Due to students' limited vocabulary,collocation errors and the negative transfer of language,their writings' appropriateness and fluency can't meet the standard of the NMET.Although they spend lots of time in writing,the results are far from satisfactory.In order to change this situation,this thesis attempts to adopt the lexical approach to improve students' English basic writing competence.The theory foundations of this thesis are psycholinguistic foundation and language acquisition foundation.According to Michael Lewis,“Language consists of grammaticalized lexis,not lexicalized grammar.” He emphasizes that language consists of ready-made units in the form of semi-fixed and fixed expressions rather than single word.The lexical chunks are input in brain as a whole and retrieved as a whole,which can improve writings' fluency,accuracy and coherence as well as reduce the pressure of limited writing time.The research questions of the thesis are listed as follows:(1)In what way(s)can the lexical approach have influence on students' attitudes to English writing?(2)How does the lexical approach improve students' writing competence?(3)Why can the lexical approach improve students' writing competence?There are 90 subjects from two classes in Grade 1 of Panjin senior high school in this study.Experimental class has 20 boys and 25 girls,control class has 22 boys and 23 girls.By analyzing the results of pre-test between two classes,it shows that the two classes' English writing competence are the same level.The experiment lasts almost 16 weeks from September,2015 to January,2016.The author teaches the two classes with the same textbook-New Senior English for China Students Book1.The experimental class is applied the lexical chunks to teach English writing,while the control class is taught in traditional teaching method.The author adopts the questionnaire,the interview and pre-test and post-test as the experimental instruments.From sixteen-week experiment,the study shows that the students in experimental class have changed the attitudes towards English writing and the strategies of English writing.Compared with the control class,students master the lexical approach,which greatly stimulates students' interest in writing and improves their confidence in writing.Through the experiment,the quantity of used lexical chunks in experiment group increases greatly.And students' writing competence in experiment group are significantly higher than control group.In consequence,we can draw a conclusion that the lexical approach has a positive influenceon students' English basic writing in senior high school.