A Study On The Effects Of Reading-to-write Approach On The Use Of Lexical Chunks In Senior High School Students’ Writing

Writing plays an important role in English learning.However,students’ writing ability is not satisfying.As is often the case,they can not write in English thought and expressions and their writings are full of Chinglish and mistakes.One of the reasons for this phenomenon is that students are weak in applying lexical chunks in English writing.In order to improve students’ ability to use lexical chunks in English writing,it is essential for English teachers to find out an effective teaching method in writing.Therefore,Reading-to-Write teaching method is applied in this research to develop students’ writing ability.The thesis,which is based on the theories of Krashen’s Input Hypothesis and Swain’s Output Hypothesis,applies Reading-to-write approach to study if reading helps to improve students’ writing ability.The study leads students how to read the passages taken from the textbooks and reference compositions to accumulate the lexical chunks of related topics and use them to write sentences and compositions.The thesis attempts to answer the following three research questions:(1)Is Reading-to-write approach helpful in improving students’ writing ability?(2)ls Reading-to-write approach effective in developing students’ ability to apply lexical chunks in students’ English writing?(3)What kind of lexical chunk in writing can be improved most by Reading-to-write approach?In the study,two parallel group from a certain high school in Qiqihar are chosen to be research subjects.The experiment lasts for 15 weeks.Class 1 Senior 3 is appointed as the experimental group and Class 4 Senior 3 as the control group.From the questionnaire,which is conducted in the experimental group before and after the experiment,and the change of the English writing grades from the experimental group and the control group both in the pre-test and in the post-test,it has following findings.Firstly,students from the experimental group have made more progress than students from the control group in English writing grades.Secondly,students from the experimental group are more intended to collect lexical chunks and try to use them in their writing.Thirdly,the number of proper use lexical chunks in experimental group is increasing,especially the proper use of sentence frames.It draws the conclusion that Reading-to-write approach is helpful in improving students’ writing ability and their ability to apply lexical chunks,especially sentence frames in their writing.