A Study On The Application Of Chunks In Teaching Less Efficient Writers English Writing At Senior High School

In recent days, most high school English teachers have been puzzled about the problem that the high school students' writing ability are far behind the due requirements for English writing. Having realized that the reason why the students are weak in English writing is their small vocabulary and poor grammar, the teachers take various corresponding measures, such as spending more time explaining words and grammar or reciting the suggested articles, only to find the situation little changed. Recent work in psychology, language acquisition, and corpus research has uncovered substantial evidence for chunks—the language units which exist with high frequency in language. As such, chunks are likely to become an increasingly important topic in Applied Linguistic circles, simply because they are a key element in how language is used.Lexical Approach, based on Michael Lewis' theory that "language consists of grammatical lexis—not lexicalized grammar.", lay great emphasis on chunks. As composites of grammar, semantics and pragmatics, chunks play a vital part in everyday communication, contributing to the ease, fluency and appropriateness in listening, speaking, reading and writing. The positive effects of chunks on English writing can be seen as follows. Firstly, because lexical chunks can be used as a whole, this spares the students some of the processing effort required to translate word by word, and accordingly avoid the collocation mistakes caused by Chinese translation. Secondly, lexical chunks can also help the students to be quickly used to the way English natives organize the articles. Furthermore, being memorized as a whole, they can relieve the students of the heavy burden of remembering English words and analyzing complicated grammar.The thesis probes into teaching English writing at senior high school by chunks. Focusing on the students whose grades are below 15 and above 10 in writing part in examinations, the essay explores the way to increase the students' awareness of chunks by offering them topic-related articles to acquire chunks and various exercises to consolidate chunks. Then an experiment is employed to verify the positive effect of chunks on English writing. Finally, based on the result of the experiment, the essay provides some suggestions on further improvement of the teaching.The thesis falls into 6 chapters. Chapter One introduces the origin, method and design of the research. Chapter Two presents a literature review in this study, including the definition and the classification of chunks, the advantages of chunks to English writing as well as empirical study of chunks. Chapter Three, the highlight of the essay, begins with the introduction of three present popular lexical approaches, and then comes to the discussion of chunks' application in teaching English writing at senior high school. The discussion deals with the following four aspects. First, what kind of chunks should be chosen for teaching? Since Lewis' Lexical Approach and the requirements for English writing in recent NMETs are considered in this thesis, more attention is paid to the following chunks: 1) collocations; 2) sentence frames and heads; 3) topic-related chunks; 4) discourse devices. Second, how are the chunks presented to the students? As writing is learnt from reading, better-organized and nicely-worded reading articles would be the best choice for the input of chunks. Third, what are the exercises to help the students to use the chunks? According to Nattinger(1992), only by adopting exercises of various levels related to the chunks can communication be well-developed. Thus three kinds of exercises are adopted: exercises to aid memory of chunks, exercises to form sentence patterns and exercises to better article organization. Fourth, how do students consolidate chunks? Here 3 ways are emphasized: translating chunk by chunk, reciting according to some given chunks and recognizing chunks through reading. Chapter Four concerns the research methodology. The objectives, subjects, the instruments employed and the procedures of the investigation are introduced as well as the result and the discussion. Chapter Five follows the analysis and discussion of the previous part to sum up the implications of the present investigation to senior high school English writing. On the one hand, the teacher's job is not only limited to "teaching" chunks, but also cultivate the students' ability in dealing with chunks on their own after class. On the other hand, it is not wise to completely discard grammar analysis, but necessary to make some explanation on the obscure chunks to the students. Finally the thesis arrives at the conclusion.