An Experimental Study Of The Effects Of Chunk-based Vocabulary Teaching On Seniors' English Writing

Since Lewis put forward Lexical Approach last century,lexical chunks have gained more and more attention in the field of second language teaching.Chunks,rather than individual words,are considered as the smallest unit of natural language.As a combination of grammatical structure and pragmatic function,lexical chunks have superior advantages in communication.The author believed that chunk-based vocabulary teaching will lead to the lexical acquisition as well as the language production.English writing,as a productive skill,is the most important skill in learning a foreign language.In order to help students improve their writing performance,the author applies Lexical Approach to English class teaching and explores what relationship there exists between applying lexical chunks to English vocabulary teaching and students' writing ability in senior high school.An experimental research was conducted in Senior Grade One in Xinhui Overseas Chinese Middle School located in Jiangmen City.124 students from Class 7 and Class 8 are the participants in this research.One of the two classes is chosen as the experimental class and the other as the control class randomly.Both of the classes are taught by the author.During the experiment,the control class was generally taught in the traditional way while in the experimental class chunk-based vocabulary teaching method was applied.The experiment lasted three and a half months,whose aim was to answer these three questions:(1)Compared with the traditional method,is the lexical chunk-based approach in vocabulary teaching more beneficial to improving students' writing performance?(2)How does the lexical chunk-based approach in vocabulary teaching contribute to the improvement of accuracy and fluency in students' writing?(3)What relationship is there between the number of lexical chunks and writing performance of students?After three and a half months' experiment,the results show that students in the experimental class were able to show a statistically significant increase in their writing performance.Students in EC used far more lexical chunks in the post-test than the students in CC.The results of this present study echoed the findings by past researcher(Schmitt,2008)that applying lexical chunks to vocabulary teaching ishighly effective and has a positive effect on the accuracy and fluency in students' writing.We can draw a conclusion that the application of the lexical chunks can significantly raise students' awareness in using lexical chunks and improve their English writing scores.In a word,lexical chunks-based vocabulary teaching place prime importance on the teaching of conventionalized multi-word lexical items,or unanalyzed chunks,as a useful mechanism for fostering senior high school students' writing production of forms and their subsequent development of L2 competence.