An Action Research Guided By Lexical Approach To Improve Senior High School Students’ Writing Ability

The English Curriculum Standards for Senior high schools(2017)points out that writing is one of the components of language skills,which can objectively reflect the language expression ability and thinking ability of English learners.Besides,writing occupies a considerable proportion in the college entrance examination.Therefore,the teaching of writing in senior high school is very important.However,the real situation is that English writing has always been a weak part in English teaching of senior high school and has many problems.From the perspective of students,students,it is difficult for students to finish the composition fluently.In addition,students are generally afraid of writing and they lack of enthusiasm for writing.It is hard for senior high school students to write a composition fluently with complete structure and accurate words.From the perspective of teachers,some teachers place too much emphasis on the teaching of grammar and rarely design various and interesting writing exercise.Thus,the importance of writing has been downplayed.For years,researchers have been working on the study of writing and teaching methods,and trying to find effective ways to improve this dilemma.Some of the previous researchers’ experiments show that lexical chunks combine the advantages of grammar,semantics and context and have relatively fixed forms.Lexical chunks are semi-fixed parts of the language,which can be extracted as a whole directly when used.And compared with a single word,the lexical chunks selected by students much conform to native speakers’ speaking habit,which to a large extent avoids the trouble caused by Chinglish.And the most important thing is that lexical chunks can improve the fluency of writing.For all the above reasons,the author carried out the research under the guidance of Lewis’ classification of lexical chunk and the implication of lexical chunk,with the aim of improving students’ writing ability and interest.Besides,the author adopts input hypothesis as theoretical basis.And the main research questions of this study are:(1)Do the students improve writing ability by the application of lexical chunks under the guidance of lexical approach? If the answer is yes,in what aspects?(2)Can the application of lexical chunks in English writing improve students’ writing interest? If the answer is yes,why does it take effect?The author adopted the method of action research,then the two cycles of action research were carried out in Ji Hua Middle School in Chongqing.Fifty-four students in senior one participated in the research.And the action research started from September 2019 to January 2020.Besides,the author followed the patterns of “planning”,“acting”,“observing” and “reflection” to implement it.The author chose the questionnaire,teaching journal,interview and test as the research instrument to collect data.Through careful analysis of the data,the author can draw the following conclusion: applying lexical chunks in English Writing teaching can improve student’ writing ability,and the lexical approach can effectively cultivate students’ interest in English writing.The conclusion is embodied in the following three aspects: firstly,the author found that the number of lexical chunks used by students has increased significantly from the data.Secondly,the writing scores has increased a lot.Finally,students’ writing fluency improves significantly.All in all,the lexical approach is conductive to the improvement of students’ English writing ability and interest.The results of the thesis have a guiding significance towards English writing teaching in senior high school.At the same time,this thesis also points out an implication of applying lexical chunks in English writing.It requires teachers to do reflection and adjustment timely in their teaching procedure.However,this action research still has some shortcoming,for example,this research lasted only one semester and the time is limited.Therefore,the author should continue to improve the research in this field in the future teaching practice.