An Empirical Study On The Application Of Chunk Recitation To High School Students’ English Writing

Vocabulary is the basis of language learning.Students usually spend a lot of time in reciting vocabulary in the process of English learning.However,being able to recite English words does not mean being able to use them correctly.Most of the students just remember the form and meaning of the words but do not know their collocation and usage precisely.Therefore,it is imperative to explore more effective vocabulary accumulation method and to improve the efficiency of reciting English words.Becker,a famous linguist,came up with the chunk teaching method in 1975.Later many scholars also have a study on lexical chunks.English Curriculum Standards for Senior High School(2017)clarifies the presentation of chunks in English teaching.Therefore,it is clear that chunks play an important role in English teaching.Nevertheless,most of the existing studies of chunks are about chunk teaching and college English,and there are few studies on how to help students recite chunks effectively.Therefore,this paper aims to study how to help high school students recite chunks effectively and apply the recited chunks to English writing flexibly to improve high school students’ English writing ability.To verify the application of chunk recitation in high school students’ English writing,the researcher puts forward the following two hypotheses:(1)By reciting lexical chunks,high school students can improve their English writing ability effectively.(2)The teaching route of teacher’s analysis—students’ recitation—consolidation exercises—chunk writing can help students recite chunks effectively and use the recited chunks in English writing flexibly.To verify the hypotheses,the researcher conducted the research that lasted for four months,taking the students coming from two classes in Grade One of NO.1 middle school in Xishui county,Guizhou province as subjects.The researcher adopted questionnaire,interview,and test methods during the research procedure.The researcher adopted chunk recitation method in the experimental class and taught these students the concept of chunks at the beginning of the term.At the same time,the researcher designed various kinds of exercises to help students understand and recite the lexical chunks.During the writing process,the researcher guided students to think about the lexical chunks related to the topic and use them in the composition.However,the researcher did not adopt chunk recitation method in the control class.That’s to say,the researcher did not cultivate those students’ awareness of chunks and did not require them to recite chunks.At the end of the term,by comparing the two classes’ pre-test and post-test writing scores the researcher found that students of the experimental class have more improvement in writing scores than students in the control class.At the same time,by calculating the lexical chunks used in the two tests,the researcher found that students in the experimental class applied more chunks to the post-test when compared with the pre-test and the control class.Thus,the conclusion that chunk recitation can effectively improve high school students’ English writing ability can be got from the data collected from the tests.Besides,from the tests’ results and the interview results,the conclusion that the teaching route of teacher’s analysis—students’ recitation—consolidation exercises—chunk writing can help students recite chunks effectively and use the recited chunks in English writing flexibly can be got.This research can provide some valuable teaching references for English teachers.Through this research,English teachers will understand the functions chunk recitation have to English writing further and understand how to guide students to recite chunks effectively and use the recited chunks in English writing flexibly.However,this research lasted for 4 months.If it lasted longer,the experiment effect would be better.