Chunks And High School Students' English Writing Ability

There're many problems in teaching writing in high school English classroom lacking good writing textbooks, the importance of writing being neglected by teachers, and low efficiency in teaching writing. The New Curricular Standard of English for Chinese Senior Middle School Students (2003) requires that students'compositions should be coherent with right grammar, proper words, rational structure and clear expression. As students have limited vocabulary and knowledge of grammar, they make mistakes in collocation of words, in grammar and expressions. Besides, students'Chinese thinking often affects their English expressions in writing. To improve the effectiveness of teaching English writing, an innovative writing approach based on chunk theory is adopted in the English writing teaching for the belief that by means of inputting enough chunks, emphasizing accumulation of chunks and enhancing the ability of using chunks, the students'writing will be more precise, fluent and genuine and fully develop the writing competence.This study has carried out an experiment in two classes, of which one is experimental group, and the other is a control group. In the experimental group, the chunk theory enhancing writing method is applied, while in the control group traditional writing method is used. Before and after the experiment, students write a composition respectively. During the one year's experiment, the paper tries to input more chunks to improve the experimental students'writing in three periods. All these compositions are marked by two teachers experienced both in teaching English and marking writing, and the average is calculated. SPSS is employed to analyze data. The result shows that the performance of the experimental group is obviously better than those of the control group. Therefore, a conclusion is drawn after a systematic analysis:the new writing teaching method of using chunk theory is better for arousing students'writing interest and improving their writing ability than the traditional one.The paper holds that students should be guided to accumulate chunks, grasp their usage and use them properly in writing, which will improve students' writing fluency and accuracy, thus improving their writing ability.