The Lexical-Chunk Approach And English Writing In Senior High Schools

In recent years, 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.Being the combination of"form"and"function", Lexical chunks are the language units that exist with high frequency in language. They are composites of grammar, semantics and pragmatics, playing a vital part in everyday communication. It is a ubiquitous phenomenon which deserves more attention in the process of foreign language learning. Michael Lewis once said,"Language consists of grammaticalized lexis, not lexicalized grammar". ( Michael Lewis, 1993).With the development of English corpus linguistics in recent years, many researchers have found that the communication in English is not completed only through words, phrases or sentences. Most natural utterances are completed by the semi-fixed"chunks"existing between words and fixed phrases (杨玉晨,1999). Lexical chunks are the ready-made memorized combinations in the language. Once they are acquired and stored in the human brain, they are easily retrievable and accessible. With lexical chunks as the core and based on cognitive psychology, the lexical approach (Lewis, 1993) is a kind of compromise between structural approach and communicative approach. It involves a completely different concept of foreign language teaching and learning, attaches great significance to"chunk"but not vocabulary,"language sense"but not grammar.There is no doubt that writing is the most important one of the four skills in foreign language learning, but the present situation of Chinese senior high school students' writing is far from satisfactory. During recent years, studies on lexical chunk begin to accumulate, however, most of which remain on the level of theoretical discussion while leave many practical problems especially for students in senior high schools unexplored.On the basis of a brief introduction to its definition and characteristics, an empirical study is made of the students' compositions aiming at investigating whether the lexical-chunk approach applied in READING AND VOCABULARY can improves senior high school students' English writing.The experiment involved 80 students coming from two naturally occurring classes in Juxian Experimental School, 40 students in each class. The lexical-chunk approach which last for four months is the core of the study. The two classes were designated randomly as one experimental group (EG) and one control group (CG). In this experiment, the control group was taught in the traditional teaching method through the whole term. While EG was emphasized the concept of lexical chunks and applied lexical-chunk approach. At the beginning and the end of the experiment, the two groups were all required to finish a composition with the same topic in limited time, and then the compositions were scored. After that, all the data were entered into the computer.After collecting the data, SPSS 13.0 was employed for statistic analysis. Results showed that there was no significant difference on composition scores between the two groups in the pre-test. However, in the post-test, the composition scores of EG were significantly higher than those of CG. As the difference was only on the part of lexical-chunk 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 READING AND VOCABULARY and emphasizing the relevant knowledge contributes to improving writing marks.So the outcome of the study proves that the application of lexical-chunk approach to improve writing marks is feasible. It is hoped that the study will show some light on the issue of how to improve English writing effectively in order to achieve the teaching objective.