The Application Of Lexical Chunk Approach To English Writing Teaching In Senior High School

Listening,speaking,reading and writing are four major parts of English teaching,and all of them play an essential role in English learning.However,much attention is attached to listening and reading.The teaching of writing is neglected to some degree.As one of the four basic language skills,writing has always been an important index of students'comprehensive language competence.It can reflect students'overall ability of language application,including vocabulary,grammar,as well as discourse organization.However,it is not easy to compose a good piece of writing.As a language output,writing is difficult in nature.In addition,due to the deficiency of the current teaching mode of English writing as well as students'negative writing attitude,some students'writing scores are far from satisfactory.And their writing ability cannot meet the requirements set by National English Curriculum Standard for Senior High Schools.Therefore,it is very urgent to promote current teaching methods of English writing and improve students'writing competence.In 1975,Becker first puts forward the concept of lexical chunks,which paves the way for a new perspective for English teaching.Lexical chunks,as the name implies,refers to the combination of words or other meaningful elements,which are stored and retrieved as a whole unit in the human brain.They are supposed to ease the burden of language processing,and facilitate language production.This new perspective of language teaching has inspired a great number of researchers and educators to devote themselves to the empirical studies.Lexical chunk approach is believed to be applicable to English writing teaching.It can help students overcome the negative transfer of mother tongue,and improve the accuracy,fluency and coherence of the written language.Therefore,the author believes it is effective to apply lexical chunk approach to English writing teaching at senior high schools.And she puts forward the following two research questions:?1?What effects does the application of lexical chunk approach in English writing teaching have on students'grades??2?What is the impact of lexical chunk approach on students'attitude towards English writing?To explore the questions above,the author carried out a teaching experiment from September 1^st,2017 in Xiangcheng Senior High School.She chose 133 research subjects from two parallel classes in Senior Two,and assigned Class 7 as the experimental class?EC?,Class8 as the control class?CC?at random.Before the experiment,students in the two classes were required to take a pre-test.The results showed that there were no significant differences between the pre-test scores of the two classes.Therefore,the author can conduct her teaching experiment.She adopted lexical chunk approach in the EC,and the whole teaching procedure can be divided into three steps.They were“introduce lexical chunks”,“accumulate and consolidate lexical chunks”,and“apply and reinforce lexical chunks”.In addition,the author followed traditional writing teaching method in the CC.Apart from tests,the author also employed questionnaire and interview as the research instruments,hoping to study students'expectation,confusion and demands concerning English writing.At the end of the experiment,the author tested the writing competence and writing attitudes of the two classes.With the help of SPSS 20.0,the author found that there were significant differences in the results between the two classes.The mean score was increased by more than 5 points in the EC,while there was no significant improvement in that of the CC.Besides,according to the results of questionnaires and interviews,students in the EC became more interested in English writing.And they also developed more positive attitudes towards English writing.Furthermore,some students also cultivated chunking awareness during the experiment.Based on the above results,the author listed her major findings as follows:?1?The application of lexical chunk approach can help students improve their writing grades.?2?Lexical chunk approach can stimulate students'writing interest,and enhance their writing attitudes and confidence.However,due to the deficiency of the author's theoretical competence,teaching ability as well as several objective reasons,there still existed some limitations in this study.Therefore,the author put forward some suggestions for further studies.