An Empirical Study Of Improving High School Students' Writing Skills By The Prefabricated Chunk Approach

Writing is one of the most important skills in foreign language learning. As English teachers, we have been searching for some good ways to improve students'writing skills, but the present situation of their writing is far from satisfactory. The majority of the students cannot complete the writing task within the limited time. Some sentences in their compositions are unidiomatic, even mistaken. In order to seek more efficient ways, the author focuses on the theory of prefabricated chunk approach, which is well-received by lots of teachers and researchers nowadays.Prefabricated chunks are the unit of language input between sentences and words. They can be stored in human's memory as a unified whole and be retrieved directly when necessary. The application of prefabricated chunks to English teaching can help learners overcome negative transfer from their native language, and increase language processing efficiency, thus producing fluent, accurate and native-like language. Excellent linguistic output contributes to learners'good writing skills because writing is one of aspects of linguistic output.This paper is an empirical study of the prefabricated chunk approach to English teaching in high schools, aiming to improve high schools' writing skills by the approach. The result of the study is to prove the hypothesis of the application of prefabricated chunk approach to English teaching and help students improve linguistic output and their writing skills.The participants in the study are K0813, a Senior 2 class consisting of 50 students (EG:Experimental group) and K0815, another Senior 2 class of 50 students (CG:Control Group) from Zhounan High School. They have almost the same performance in the pre-test, so they can be chosen to the research.During the research, students from CG are taught in the traditional way by another experienced teacher Miss Yang Jianxia in Zhounan High School. She puts emphasis on the meaning and usage of each separate words or phrases, while students from EG taught by the author mainly learn chunks from textbooks. Various activities and exercises related to prefabricated chunks form the basis of classroom practice which aims at aiding students in establishing the concept of chunks and making them use prefabricated chunks consciously. Through the statistical analysis, the results indicate that the students from EG and CG all have achieved progress after the instruction, however, the composition grades from EG are apparently higher than those from CG. And the results of the translation exercises concerning prefabricated chunks from EG is also much better than those from CG. That is to say, the application of different prefabricated chunk exercises and training to English teaching is an efficient way to improve students'language writing skills. Therefore, the hypothesis can be proved.According to the conclusions, the author suggests English teachers pay more attention to prefabricated chunk approach in high school English teaching, and try to adopt a variety of ways to train prefabricated chunk in daily teaching so as to improve students'linguistic output and writing skills.