A Study Of The Effect On English Productive Skills Exerted By Lexical Chunks Teaching In Senior Middle School

English language skill is an important part of the comprehensive linguistic competence for senior middle school students, among which speaking and writing grouped as productive skills can evidently embody the students’English language proficiency. The New Curriculum Standard of Senior English for China has put more emphasis on the development of the students’speaking and writing productive skills. Since Becker came up with the term Lexical Chunks and later put forward his Lexical Approach, they have been paid increasing attention to due to the fact that lexical chunks possess the features of both vocabulary and grammar. But the real situation in most senior middle schools is that the English teachers mostly stick to the old rules, thus the students’ speaking and writing skills haven’t achieved due development. The author of this dissertation holds the view that when teaching senior middle school students, teachers should resort to lexical approach as an alternative. We begin with lexical knowledge, then raise the students’ awareness of lexical chunks, and based on different teaching contents, teachers can design various instructional activities to improve their English productive skills through oral and written productive exercises.This thesis starts by reviewing the lexical chunks theory and lexical approach. Next this thesis introduces the present situation for lexical chunks teaching both at home and abroad, the definition of English productive skills and the requirements and evaluation by the New Curriculum Standards of Senior English for China. Then by using the empirical research method, the author carries out an experiment on the students from two classes of the same level in Grade one. The New Senior English For China Student’s Book1&2by People’s Education Press is used as the teaching material. In the experimental class, the author employs the lexical chunks teaching, guiding the students to learn about the lexical chunks, to search, differ, compare, explore and finally grasp them through oral and written productive practice. Also after class the students are encouraged to collect as many chunks as possible. While in the control class, the author follows the traditional way. The students are simply required to read and memorize the words and expressions already listed in the vocabulary. Having explained the words and provided the Chinese equivalents, the teacher just orders the students to copy them. The vocabulary is learned in isolation, and little attention has been drawn to the context.The author makes a pretest and posttest for the students before and after the experiments, from which the data are collected and analyzed using the SPSS19.0.It turns out that compared with the experimental class itself or with the control class, the students in the experimental class have made far greater progress in English productive skills.Therefore, it can be concluded that the lexical chunks teaching exerted on the senior middle school students contributes much to the rapid and remarkable improvement of students’English productive skills.