Lexical Chunks And English Writing Teaching

Writing, as one of the four main basic skills, can reflect how well a language learner uses the target language, but it is long neglected in China especially in junior middle school English teaching.Recently, writing is re-affirmed, for it can help predominate English learning. In order to improve students'writing capacity, many researches have been undertaken and much success has been obtained in applying different approaches, such as the Product Approach, the Process Approach, the Genre Approach, the Length Approach, etc.Though great efforts have been made, writing is still far from satisfaction in junior middle school English teaching. Analyzing the errors in the students'compositions, it is found that the common errors mainly lie in the misuse of plural forms, third-person singular forms, verb tenses and improper expressions in Chinese order and bewilderment of many kinds of clauses. The most important problem in junior middle school students'compositions is that they get too much influence from Chinese. This phenomenon is called negative transfer. Researches on language transfer began with Wen Qiufang & Gu Chunjie in 1998 and was carried further by Wang Wenyu & Wen Qiufang (2002). Although many approaches have been adopted to help students enhance the correctness and accurateness in their writing, still no significant changes emerge.The Lexical Approach, whose fundamental principle is:"language consists of grammatical lexis, not lexicalized grammar", was first coined by Lewis and his associates (1993). This approach is a new approach to foreign language teaching. It has been put into practice in several universities and proved a successful new teaching method for helping students improve their writing, but it was seldom used in junior middle schools.This thesis is an attempt to investigate whether applying Lexical Approach can overcome L1 negative transfer in junior middle school students'compositions and enhance the correctness and accurateness of their writings. An experiment is carried out during the research. This experiment lasts more than four months. It involved 105 students coming from two naturally occurring classes in No.1 Middle School of Taoluo in Rizhao. Class One, Grade Three is designated randomly as one experimental group (EG) and Class Three, Grade Three is the control group (CG). The CG was taught with the traditional teaching method while Lexical Approach was applied to the EG. One questionnaire is applied twice before and after the experiment. Three kinds of composition are collected and analyzed in a quantitative way. The results of the study have proved that Lexical Approach is suitable for junior middle school English teaching. It can effectively overcome L1 negative transfer, and has positive effects on students'awareness of lexical chunks and on the accuracy and idiomaticalness in their English writing.