Toward A Chunk-based Systemic Approach To EFL Teaching In The Senior High School

Up to now, there have been problems in enhancing senior high school students’ fluency,accuracy and self-confidence in their EFL speaking and writing. It is therefore important todevise a feasible approach to senior high school EFL teaching so as to solve such problems.The development of chunk-based approaches to language instruction has made much progressand has shed some light on solving the afore-mentioned problems. So far, however, existingstudies aiming at designing chunk-based language teaching approaches have not beenspecifically oriented to the senior high school and have often suffered from theoretical andmethodological partiality. It is thus necessary for the present study to explore, on the basis ofprevious studies, a chunk-based systemic approach to senior high school EFL teaching.Firstly, in the light of dialectical systemic thinking, on the basis of Michael Lewis’Chunk-based Language Teaching and related theories and methods, and through the methodsof theoretical deduction and induction, this study explores the theories and methods ofchunk-based language instruction in the senior high school and formulates a chunck-basedsystemic approach to senior high school EFL teaching. This approach comprises twocomponents: metastrategy and strategies. The former of these is the strategy to systemicallyadministrate the latter. The latter are horizontally composed of views, theories, methods, andprocedures of chunck-based systemic approach to senior high school EFL teaching. Amongthe interconnected procedures are those of chunk recognition and memorization, chunkimitation and application, chunk practice and reinforcement, and chunk summarization andevaluation.Secondly, this study verifies the effects of the chunk-based systemic approach to highschool EFL teaching on enhancing the fluency, accuracy, and self-confidence in the learners’EFL speaking and writing and learning through a one-semester (19-week) experimentcomprising a pretest and pre-survey, a period of strategy implementation, and a posttest andpost-survey, taking as its subjects of study104students of grade two from a certain seniorhigh school in China, and employing EFL proficiency tests, self-confidence questionnairesand interviews as tools of data collecting. Results generated from the analysis of data revealthat the chunck-based systemic approach to senior high school EFL teaching has helped to (1)enhance the students’ fluency and accuracy in EFL speaking and writing and (2) increase thestudents’ self-confidence in EFL learning.Pedagogically, this study is significant in that its findings are directly applicable to seniorhigh school EFL teaching and capable of enhancing students’ fluency and accuracy and self-confidence in EFL speaking, writing and learning. Academically, it is valuable as it maycompensate for some of the limitations in chunk-based language teaching research such astheir negligence of the senior high school and its lack of enough integrity.