An Empirical Study On The Effects Of Corpus-based Lexical Chunks Teaching On Senior High School Students' Writing Ability

In China,to improve students' English application ability is always one of the objectives of English teaching.Students' language output ability is an important reference for evaluating their English application ability.However,in today's English teaching in primary and secondary schools,teachers often attach importance to students' input of language knowledge while neglect students' ability to produce language.The lack of English writing ability is also a reflection of students' insufficient language output ability.Students in primary and secondary schools generally reflect that writing is a difficult part during their English learning process.With the development of lexical approach,many scholars apply lexical chunks teaching to English writing teaching.The researches on lexical approach are classified into theory-driven studies and corpus-driven studies.Theory-driven studies are more based on the theory of lexical chunks teaching,strengthening students' awareness of lexical chunks,and the material used are mainly students' textbooks.The corpus-driven studies emphasis on providing students with corpora,to help students explore,understand the meaning,usage and collocation of lexical chunks.Therefore,this article applies corpus-based lexical chunks teaching to English writing teaching,and mainly discusses the following three questions:(1)Can corpus-based lexical teaching method improve students' writing ability of high school students? To what extent?(2)Is students' writing score related to the numbers of lexical chunks employed in the writing? To what extent?(3)What are the differences on the use of lexical chunks in compositions between high-score students and low-score students?The research subjects are two classes of students in Tongshan senior high school.The total number of research subjects is 95.During the experiment,the traditional teaching method is used in the control class,while the corpus-based lexical chunks teaching method is used in the experimental class.Because students have difficulty in reading online corpus BNC and COCA,the author built a small corpus of about 310,000 words before the experiment,which is used to search,compare,explore and summarize important lexical chunks.After three months of experiment,SPSS22.0 and AntConc3.4.4 tools are used to collect and analyze the compositions and the data.The results show that:(1)Compared with pretest,the writing scores of the experimental class and the control class are both improved.The writing scores of experimental class improved 1.781 points while the control class improved 0.543 points,which shows that the progress of the experimental class is greater than that of the control class.(2)The lexical chunks used by students in control class increased about one lexical chunks in average,while the experimental class increased about four lexical chunks.At the same time,there is a positive correlation between the number of lexical chunks used in composition and writing performance.(3)There is a big difference in the types and quality of lexical chunks used by high-score and low-score students.The types and quality of lexical chunks both have great effects on their writing performance.This experiment also proves the applicability of corpus-based lexical chunks teaching,which plays an active role in English writing teaching of high school students.To improve students' writing ability,the research suggests that teachers' and students' awareness of lexical chunks should be strengthened,and that students' self-learning ability should also be enhanced.The corpus-based lexical chunks teaching can effectively improve students' writing performance.