An Empirical Study On The Effects Of Lexical Chunk Instruction On English Writing In Junior High Schools

English writing teaching,an indispensable part of English teaching for junior high school students,has been one of the concerns of researchers.A considerable number of studies focus on the relationship between lexical chunk instruction and English writing.Also,there are many empirical studies about the effects of lexical chunk instruction on students’ English writing competence in our country.However,most of the study subjects were college students and high school students,and few studies involved junior high school students as subjects.So this study aims to research on the influence of lexical chunk instruction on the English writing of junior high school students.Based on the constructivism theory and Krashen’s input hypothesis,this study explores the impact of lexical chunk instruction on junior high school students’ English writing and addresses the following two research questions:1)What are the effects of lexical chunk instruction on the use of lexical chunks in students’ English writing in junior high schools?2)What are the effects of lexical chunk instruction on students’ English writing proficiency in junior high schools?This study’s subjects involved 60 students from two classes of a middle school in Shaodong(30 students from Experimental Class,and30 students from Control Class).Research time was 14 weeks.Experimental Class adopted lexical chunk instruction for English writing teaching,and Control Class adopted traditional English writing teaching method.A pretest and two posttests were used in this study to research the effects of lexical chunk instruction on English writing in junior high schools.Data were analyzed by SPSS 21.0.Major findings of this study are as follows: 1)After the experiment,the number of lexical chunks in English writing of Experimental Class greatly increased,and students tended to use the poly-words more frequently than other kinds of lexical chunks.The results show that it is positive for junior high school students to apply lexical chunk instruction to increase the number of lexical chunks in their English writing.2)After the experiment,Experimental Class’ s English writing proficiency was significantly enhanced.All the students from these two classes had a great improvement in their English writing,but the students’ overall writing competence from Experiment Class was higher than the students’ competence from Control Class.The results show that it is feasible for junior high school students to apply lexical chunk instruction to improve their writing competence.With the limited experimental condition,there are still some limitations in this study--the experiment period is not long enough,the sample size is not big enough,so the design needs to be improved infurther studies.However,this study still has its theoretical and practical value.It can provide some guidance for Chinese junior high school English writing teaching.