Application Of Lexical Chunks To The Teaching Of English Writing In Senior Middle School

New English Curriculum Standard explicitly points out one of the tasks for High School is to"pay special attention to improving the students'ability to think and express ideas in English and laying a good foundation for their development in the future and lifelong study."It shows that English writing ability is one of the most important communicative abilities that students should achieve in learning English. However, in current teaching there still exist many problems in both teaching and learning. The teaching of writing is not much valued and they still adopt traditional writing teaching approaches. The method of teaching English writing by chunks offers a new way of solving the problems. Hence, the author thinks it essential to probe into teaching English writing by chunks in order to improve writing ability.Lexical Chunks Approach, based on Michael Lewis'theory that"Language consists of grammatical lexis—not lexicalized grammar,"laid great emphasis on chunks. Chunks play a vital part in everyday communication, contributing to the ease, fluency and appropriateness in listening, speaking, reading and writing. Lexical chunks are the unity of grammatical rules, semantic meanings and pragmatic contexts. Firstly, due to their ready-made property, lexical chunks can substantially enhance language learners'writing fluency, thus accordingly avoiding the collocation mistakes caused by Chinese translation. Secondly, lexical chunks can enable language learners to use English more appropriately for their pragmatic function, which can also help the students to be quickly used to the way English natives organize the articles. In order to verify the positive effects of chunks on English writing, the author carried out an experiment in two classes in Senior Middle School in Hohhot, Inner Mongolia. It lasted for about four months. In this experiment, the control class was generally taught in the traditional way. Meanwhile, chunks instruction which is more student-centered with a lot of writing exercises was applied to the experiment class. During the experiment, the subjects were asked to take pre-test and post-test and the author planned two questionnaires. The whole process is divided into three periods. The first period is chunks accumulation and input, in which the teacher aims to help students master the chunks and writing skills. The second period is chunks comprehension and digestion. The teacher asks the students to review and consolidate the chunks by way of sentence frames and heads. The third period is chunks output, where the teacher designs a series of writing practice to develop the students'writing ability.The paper falls into five chapters. Chapter one serves as an introduction, which gives a brief description of the current situation of English writing in China. At the same time, it presents the significance of English writing. Chapter Two offers literature review in this study that provides the theoretical basis of lexical chunks approach, including the definition of chunks, the advantages of chunks to English learning as well as related studies at home and abroad. It includes the introduction of present popular lexical approaches and then the discussion of chunks'application in teaching English writing at senior high school. The discussion deals with the following four aspects: (1) chunks choice for input; (2) chunks presentation (3) chunks output (4) chunks consolidation. Chapter Three concerns the research methodology. The subjects, instruments employed and the procedures of this experiment are presented in details. Chapter Four is Results and Discussion. The author analyzes the results of pre-test, post-test and two questionnaires by means of SPSS software and the computer. The results suggest that the scores of the post-test of the experimental class are significantly higher than those of the control class. The advantages of chunks into English writing are also shown in this chapter. Some major findings of this thesis are conducted in Chapter Five, which has turned out to support the hypothesis put forward and some implications. A conclusion is drawn from the study that applying chunks into writing has effects on improving students'English writing. Owing to the limitations of the study, there still remain many practical problems, which call for teachers'and researchers'attention and endeavor for further research so that more effective methods will be brought in for teaching of English writing in the future.