A Study Of Teaching Lexical Chunks In Improving Senior Middle School Students' Writing Performance

Vocabulary is an important component of language as well as the base of linguistic abilities. Vocabulary has traditionally been thought of as individual words. In recent years, however, work in sociolinguistics and applied linguistics has led to considerable interest in the importance of multi-word chunks of language expressing an integrated meaning. Michael Lewis (1993) refers to them as lexical chunks.Lexical chunks may be treated as ready-made units, which, once they are learnt and stored, can be recalled and retrieved easily. They serve an extremely important function, especially at the beginning and intermediate stages of language learning, in terms of promoting fluency and comprehension, increasing the sense of pragmatic function and thus motivating language learners. Many early researchers thought these prefabricated and unanalyzed chunks were distinct and peripheral to the main body of language, but more recent research puts this formulaic speech at the very centre of language acquisition and sees it as basic to the creative rule-forming processes which follow (Nattinger and DeCarrico, 1992). The ever-increasing awareness of the pervasiveness of prefabricated chunks in native-speaker performance must lead us to rethink our approach to teaching English as a foreign language to Chinese senior middle school students.The empirical study in this thesis attempts to testify the hypothesis that lexical chunk instruction in the classroom setting plays an important role in improving senior middle school students'writing performance. The participants in the study were 60 students in Grade One from two naturally occurring classes of Changchun No.12 senior middle school. They were randomly designated as the Control Group and the Experimental Group. In this experiment, the Control Group is taught in the traditional teaching method. Students mainly learn discrete words by means of bilingual word lists and rote learning. In the mean time, various interesting activities and exercises related to lexical chunks form the basis of classroom practice in the Experimental Group, which aims at aiding participants in establishing the concept of chunks and making them use lexical chunks consciously. Through the statistical analysis, the results indicate that the participants of the Experimental Group have achieved significant progress in both composition grades and the number of lexical chunks used in the compositions after the instruction, no matter in comparison with the students in the Control Group or with themselves. Teaching lexical chunks seems to offer a'middle-ground'that avoids the pitfalls Widdowson (1989) warns us of: too heavy a reliance on either structural models of competence, or communicative models of appropriate use, which offers a new direction for language teaching.