Research On The Application Of The Lexical Chunk Schema To The Teaching Of Senior Middle School English Writing

The lexical chunks are special multi-word phenomena in English, which once are learnt and stored can be recalled and retrieved easily. Lexical chunks have positive effects on students'language production; therefore, the author puts forward a new conception of lexical chunk schema. This type of schema is formed according to different topics and different kinds of linking words. In other word, instead of memorizing lexical chunks randomly, memorizing a group of chunks which are about a topic or have the same function in discourse will help the students to store and retrieve them. Furthermore, lexical chunk schema not only has the advantages the lexical chunks have, but also has other advantages in the teaching of English writing in senior middle school, including: enhancing the fluency and accuracy of language output, strengthening the ability of discourse organization, broadening ideas and helping internalize linguistic rules, therefore, the author tried to apply lexical chunk schema to the writing teaching in senior middle school, assuming that the teaching of lexical chunk schema will lead to an improvement of the competence of language production.The author first investigated the students of two classes in Grade Two from The High School Attached to Hunan Normal University by means of questionnaire in order to find out the Chinese students' problems in English writing. From the survey, the author found that most of the students are not interested in English writing; they do not have good habits of English writing, nor have the awareness of lexical chunks.Based on the results of the investigation, the author conducted a teaching experiment which lasted for a semester upon the subjects from the model class. In the experiment, the teacher combined the lexical chunk schema to normal English teaching. And then the author made out some principles the teachers should obey while applying lexical chunk schema to teaching of English writing, including:adopting elicitation method, paying attention to the whole process of writing and paying attention to the reconstruction.This experiment was intended to explore the impact which lexical chunk schema teaching places on the capacity of English writing. In order to test the hypotheses, in the Control Group the teacher only focused on the teaching of lexical chunks, while in the Experimental Group she paid attention to sorting lexical chunks according to different topics and different types of discourse devices.After the experiment, the author compared the results of the pre-test and the post-test of the Experimental Group and the Control Group and the results of the post-questionnaire by means of SPSS 17.0, and arrived at the following conclusions:1) Both Control Group and Experimental Group have made progress, which confirms the former researches'conclusions that lexical chunks can improve students'writing ability.2) The progress made by the Experimental Group is larger than that of the Control Group, and the students in the Experimental Group used more lexical chunks in their compositions, which indicates that using lexical chunk schema is of greater help for students to recall more lexical chunks in their English writing, thus improving their writing ability.3) Compared with the Control Group, the students of the Experimental Group have showed greater interest in English writing after the experiment.4) Compared with the Control Group, the students of the Experimental Group have formed better habits of English writing after the study.Due to the time length and restriction of experimental conditions, this study has some limitations, for example, the sample size was relatively small and the experiment was conducted on a key middle school. Nevertheless, the author thinks that this study is of certain theoretical and practical significance, for it presents the enlightenment for the teaching of senior middle school English writing in China.