An Empirical Study On Improving High School Students' Writing By Lexical Chunk Input

Writing is an indispensable part of English language skills for students in senior middle school. National Curriculum for Senior Middle Schools and Illustrations on the National College Entrance Examination both give specific requirements on the contents and levels of writing. However, the level of English writing in senior middle schools is low for various reasons, such as teacher's teaching strategies, learners'lack of vocabulary and grammar, less training for writing, etc. Having realized that the reasons why the students are weak in English writing, many linguists and the teachers are trying to take various corresponding measures to improve the situation.Research in the field of language material has proved that there are a large number of fixed or half-fixed linguistic structures which share the feature of sentences and vocabularies in natural language. This kind of linguistic structure is just lexical chunk, which refers to the minimum language unit with frequent appearance in the language, and can be stored and used as a whole. Lexical chunk is the most ideal unit in using language. It melts grammar, meaning and context into a whole unit. Lexical chunk metrology holds that language is the vocabulary with grammar structure, but not the grammar structure with vocabulary. It emphasizes lexical chunks not vocabularies and maintains that teaching should guide students to study fixed allocations, idioms, fixed or half-fixed phrases and other such lexical chunks. Research shows that using lexical chunks helps to improve the language accuracy and frequency, constitute the structure of text, and promote the writing ability. The current lexical chunk research is mainly about theory research, and the study objects focus on the college English teaching, while the research in senior middle school is less. So my paper aims to study how to introduce lexical chunk theory to the senior middle school's English teaching practice and combine the reciting method to improve the students'writing ability.With the current situation of the students'English writing in my school, my paper tries to start with the recitation input of lexical chunks in the routine teaching and probe the utility of lexical chunks teaching method in senior middle school's English writing classes so as to improve the senior middle school students'writing ability. So the author put up the presupposition:the recitation input of lexical chunks in the routine teaching is helpful to improve the students'writing ability and accelerate the students'continuous development in the future.In order to verify the presupposition, the author takes the students of senior grade two in No.l middle school of Jinshi of Hunan as the objects. The experiment researches how to carry out the vocabulary block teaching in the routine teaching, how to learn to apply the knowledge on the basis of the accumulation of recollection, and finally reach the goal of improving writing ability:1. Cultivate the students'awareness of vocabulary block in the process of teaching.2. Guide students to memorize vocabulary blocks through various ways.3. Let students write with vocabulary blocks within the limited timeThe author conducted the experiment within twelve weeks by the methods of questionnaires and pretesting and afterwards testing. The experiment was carried out by the following ways:the experimented class was taught with the emphasis of vocabulary block center in the routine teaching:cultivate students'awareness of vocabulary block by recognizing and understanding vocabulary blocks in the text teaching and extracurricular reading; design various vocabulary block exercises to consolidate and master vocabulary blocks; use a series of practical training to practice vocabulary blocks by the way of rewriting the text; guide students to use vocabulary blocks creatively by the limited writing in the writing class; finally let students to rethink and digest vocabulary blocks by elaborating and checking their compositions and then improve the students'writing ability. While the ordinary class still adopts the traditional teaching methods, and has no systematic writing training. The routine teaching still pays more attention to the usage of vocabulary and grammar analysis, and the class has no exercises designed with the center of vocabulary blocks.During the experiment, the author insists on teaching methods and guiding students themselves to recognize the vocabulary blocks in the process of studying, asking students to summarize the grammar rules and applying laws to writing by observing and applying again and again by themselves. At the end of the experiment, the author used a kind of statistic software to test the compositions and found out:the students in experimented class have an obvious vocabulary block awareness, and they use many vocabulary blocks in the writing, the cohesion of the composition is reasonable and fluent. With the tested compositions and the questionnaires the author come to the following conclusion: recitation input of vocabulary blocks in the routine teaching can improve the students' writing ability efficiently.