A Research On The Application Of Lexical Chunks To English Composition Teaching In Senior Middle School

The importance of lexical chunks in SLA are increasingly becoming a subject studied by linguists across the world. Lexical chunks are the ready-made memorized combinations in a language, which, once acquired and stored in the human brain, can be retrieved and used automatically as wholes. Writing, as one of the most important four skills in foreign language acquisition, may sometimes fail to receive due attention because many teachers assume that writing proficiency will be the natural result of the development of language proficiency. This misunderstanding leads to less effort on the teaching and learning of writing. Besides, a lot of Chinese senior middle school students' writing is far from satisfactory. Even though they can memorize a large number of new words, problems still arise from the inner process of transferring from language input to language output. They are weak in text organizations and their composition lack the expression of authentic vivid target language.The method of teaching English by chunks offers a new way of solving the problems. Lexical chunks are the unity of grammatical rules, semantic meanings and pragmatic contexts. They are large linguistic units which appear in real language output at high frequency and are more fixed in structures. Hence, it is important for the author to probe to what extent does the application of lexical chunk instruction improve EFL writing. The research questions are as follows: 1) Does adopting lexical chunk instruction help improve EFL writing?2) What are the students' attitude towards the teaching EFL writing with the application of lexical chunks?The empirical experiment involves 60 senior two students coming from Wuxi No. 3 Senior Middle School, 30 students in each class. One of the two classes are designated as an experimental group and the other control group. In this experiment, the control group is generally taught in the traditional way. In the mean time, lexical chunk instruction is applied to the experimental group. During the experiment, the 60 students are asked to take pre- and post- writing tests and the author plans an interview with some students at the end of the experiment. The writing test papers are marked by two teachers according to the NMET writing requirements. The author has contrasted and analyzed the scores of the two tests and the feedbacks of the interview.The results show that the application of lexical chunks to EFL writing, to some degree, does help improve the learners' English writing. The students from EG have made more progress than those from CG. The students from EG use lexical chunks more smoothly and accurately in their compositions. The application of lexical chunks to EFL writing teaching helps to overcome the interference of the mother tongue and leads to authentic or native-like English sentences; Besides, the students from EG obviously have more positive attitude towards EFL writing and are more confident. The findings reveal that the instruction program does have an effect on students' abilities of EFL writing. The results also suggest that teaching Chinese students EFL writing through lexical chunk instruction is effective and docile in senior middle school.