The Lexical-Chunk Approach In EFL Teaching And Its Effect On Writing Marks

In China, writing is a required course. The result of traditional teaching method is that students can't produce a good composition after learning a large number of words and phrases as well as how to design an article. Their words and sentences don't accord with English usage, and they aren't able to use proper words and phrases in situations. The phenomenon is very common in college English writing. Therefore, it's necessary to research on how to make students write fluently and accurately in such situation. The thesis is to apply the lexical chunk approach of Lewis to intensive reading class, in order to find out whether the lexical chunk approach can really improve students'English writing marks.The lexical approach, with the fundamental principle being"language consists of grammaticalized lexis, not lexicalized grammar", was first coined by Lewis (1993) and his associates (p. 89). It is based on the idea that an important part of language acquisition is the ability to comprehend and produce lexical chunks as unanalyzed wholes or"chunks", and that these chunks become the raw data by which the learners perceive patterns of language traditionally thought of as grammar. The lexical-chunk approach emphasizes that language learners should learn and utilize lexical chunks, and claims that language production is not a process restricted by syntactic rules but some kind of larger lexical unit obtained from memory.Two intact classes of electrical engineering, 40 sophomores for each class, were involved in the experiment, with one being the experimental group (EG) and the other the control group (CG). Classroom instructions for the two groups in intensive class were not the same. CG was applied the traditional approach, while EG was emphasized the concept of lexical chunks and applied lexical-chunk approach. At the beginning and end of the experiment, the two groups were required to finish a composition with the same topic in limited time, and then the compositions were scored and the chunk numbers of the four lexical types were counted. After that, all the data were entered into the computer.After collecting the data, SPSS 11.5 was employed for statistic analysis. Results showed that there was no significant difference on chunk application and composition scores between the two groups in the pre-test. However, in the post-test, the numbers of polywords, institutionalized expressions and phrasal constrains of EG were significantly more than those of CG except sentence builders. And the composition scores of EG were significantly higher than those of CG. As the difference was only on the part of lexical approach throughout the experiment, we could ascribe the higher scores of EG to the lexical-chunk approach. The research shows that employing lexical-chunk approach in intensive class and emphasizing the relevant knowledge contributes to improving writing marks.The discussion of major findings demonstrates the positive effect of lexical-chunk approach in intensive class. Finally, pedagogic implications and limitations are summarized for teaching practice and future research.