An Experiment On The Employment Of Prefabricated Chunks In English Writing Teaching In Senior High School

With the development of The Times, the new curriculum standard had made higher demand of English writing for high school students. English writing has become one of the most important aspects in China's high school English teaching. But in fact, because of the influence of vocabulary restrictions, negative transfer of mother tongue and the limit of English writing skills, writing is always a weak links and the hardest improved skill in high school English teaching. How to develop students' writing ability and improve the students' writing level has become a hot topic.Second language acquisition research showed that prefabricated chunks play an important role in language generation and understanding. Prefabricated chunks strategy will help students maximally overcome negative transfer of mother tongue, conduce to the language fluency and vivid, to improve grammar ability and textual ability. Large-scale statistic analyses of real language materials in recent 20 years have shown that 80 percent of natural utterances are combined by the"prefabricated chunks"(Altenberg,1998).Taking the prefabricated chunks theory as the guide, This paper explores how to improve high school students' English writing ability by using prefabricated language chunks in English writing teaching, and tests whether prefabricated chunks play a positive role in high school students'English essay writing. The author tried hard to discuss the following questions: (l)What was the English writing situation in high school and to what were the students'attitudes towards English writing? (2)Could prefabricated chunks teaching method effectively promote the student writing ability by comparing to the traditional teaching method? (3)Was the number of prefabricated chunks increased in students'composition after using prefabricated chunks teaching method? (4)Whether the students in experimental class accept the prefabricated chunks method and whether the students'attitudes towards English writing had positive change.To answer these questions, the author adopted a qualitative and quantitative research method. There were two classes of grade2 from Ganzhou No.3 High School participating in the one-term teaching experiment. Class18 was the experimental group while Class19 was the control group. The students in the two classes were similar in writing proficiency. The author applied the prefabricated chunks teaching method in the experimental group while adopted traditional teaching methods in the control group. At the beginning and the end of this semester, two groups of students were required to attend English writing tests. The results show that students'writing score in experimental group raised and the number of prefabricated language chunks in their composition have dramatically increased after using prefabricated chunks teaching method. Prefabricated chunks teaching method can significantly improve the students' English writing ability.In addition, before the teaching experiment, the author did the questionnaire survey in experimental group to make it clear what difficulty and attitude the students had in English writing. After the teaching experiment, the author conducted the questionnaire survey again. The survey shows that the students'attitudes towards English writing had positive change in experimental group. The students in experimental group strengthened their confidence to English writing and most of them thought that the prefabricated chunks teaching method was fit for them.