The Effect Of Lexical Chunk Approach On Students' Writing Performance In Senior High School

The role of the lexical chunk approach in the second language acquisition has gained more and more attention in recent years.Researchers considered that lexical chunks,as the composites of form,meaning and function stored and retrieved as a whole in the brain,can release the language processing burden and improve the fluency and idiomatically of language output.It means that lexical chunks are groups of words which are stored in our memory as if they are one word.Mastering this kind of approach can help the student make sentences grammatically and speaking more fluently to some degree.Consequently,this research paper brings forward a broad overview of the lexical chunk approach proposed by Michael Lewis(1993)as an alternative to traditional grammar-based methods.In recent decades,an increasingly number of attention has been focused on lexical chunk approach abroad and at home.However,compared with the prosperous situations abroad,the studies of the lexical chunk approach at home are relatively few.Of all these studies,more were theoretical studies.So far in China,the empirical research in this area is still not much to see.Some studies in China have been primarily concentrated on the relationship between language output and lexical chunks.Since existing literature about lexical chunk approach in China emphasize more on theoretical researches and less empirical researches,the lexical chunk approach is a relatively new teaching method compared with other teaching methods in the English classroom.Although some researches have been done by domestic teachers of English on the application of lexical chunk theory to English writing teaching,the objects of study are mostly college English majors and non-English major in colleges or universities.Few students of senior high school are taken as the research subjects,even fewer are empirical studies of lexical chunk approach applied in private high school English writing teaching to improve linguistic accuracy for students.As an important part of our educational system,private high school is a vital complement to public high school.Therefore,the aim of this experimental research is to apply the lexical chunk approach to improve linguistic accuracy for students of private high school.In thisstudy,participants are 60 students in senior grade three in a Jiangxi high school,which is private senior high school in Jiangxi Province.Students in two science classes are selected as participants,one of which is the experimental group while the other one is the control group.According to scores of the experimental group and the control group gathered from the pre-test,they are almost at the same English level.The two classes are under the instruction of the same teacher with the same textbook.Two kinds of instruments will be used in this paper: writing tasks and interview.The writing tasks are used in the stages of pre-test and post-test,trying to get the difference between the pre-test and post-test.In order to understand the influence of lexical chunk theory on improving the accuracy of writing,a face to face interview was conducted right after each stage of the study,complete with the data collected in the writing tests.The study aims at solving the questions as follows:1)What is the impact of lexical chunk approach on students' overall writing performance?2)How does the application of lexical chunk approach influence students' writing accuracy?3)How does lexical chunk approach affect students' attitude in writing?During the three months of instruction,the experimental group that had been given an approach on lexical chunks made statistically significant improvement in their accuracy of English writing than those who did not.The descriptive statistics of the post-test of chunks produced by groups showed a significant difference between the experimental group and the control group.Meanwhile,the results of the independent t-test indicated a significant difference between the two groups' mean scores.It could be said that the main difference between the experimental group and the control group is due to the teaching method.In addition,we also found that the senior high school students used most of sentence builders,and then followed by the polywords,phrasal constraints and institutionalized expressions.The lexical chunks of sentence builders have significant correlation to the improvement of students' writing accuracy.Therefore,this research suggests that the teacher can apply lexical chunk approach to the teaching of English writing in the future,which can not only stimulate students' interest in English writing but also can guide students to consciously memorize and use the lexical chunks to improve writing ability.