The Application Of Lexical-chunk Theory To Theteaching Of English Wirting In Senior High Schools

A lexical chunk possesses peculiarities of grammar, semantics and discoursecontext. It can not only speed up language processing, but also improve accuracy andfluency of language input and output, thus it is viewed as an ideal unit for languageteaching. Lexical Approach, proposed by Michael Lewis (1993), has been paid moreand more attention to by linguists and English teachers in recent years, and it is a newtheory emerging with increasing emphasis on language pragmatism. The fundamentalprinciple of it is “language consists of grammaticalized lexis, not lexicalizedgrammar”(Lewis,1993:89). Researches of corpus analysis and computationallinguistics show that there are a large quantity of language phrases has emerged. Theyare frequently occurred in language use. The form of them is usually frequentlyoccurred, fixed or semi-fixed multi-words or sentences that can be stored andretrieved as a whole from memory at the time of use.Composition writing plays a crucial part in English learning and takes up20%oftotal score in National Matriculation English Test (NMET). Though both teachers andstudents have made great effort, English writing of senior high school students is a bigheadache. On the account of the status quo of English writing, and mainly based onLexical Approach by Michael Lewis (1993), this thesis makes a study with theapplication of lexical-chunk theory to English writing teaching, hoping to findeffective ways to improve the writing level of the senior high. So as to verify thefeasibility, the author of this thesis makes a four-month experiment on120studentsfrom two senior-one classes in Senior High School Attached to Shandong NormalUniversity, during which, the methods of questionnaire, pre-test and post-test andinterview are employed. EC and CC are designated respectively. Lexical chunks areapplied in EC, while in CC, traditional vocabulary-grammar teaching method isemployed. Then composition scores of two tests in both CC and EC are collected andanalyzed. The results indicate that with the lexical-chunk teaching, students get morefluent and accurate output and higher composition scores.This thesis is comprised of six parts. In introduction, the author presents existing research results of lexical chunks andstatus quo and problems of English writing of the senior high. On the basis of theproblems and requirements of the New English Curriculum Standards, the authorproposes the orientation of the study.Chapter one is literature review with overviews of researches both abroad and athome. Chapter two is theoretical foundation. It summarizes definition andclassification of lexical chunks and presents teaching method in this study. Chapterthree is research design and methodology, in which the research hypotheses, subjects,instruments and procedures are explained. Chapter four is data analysis and findings.SPSS (19.0) is utilized to deal with the data. The results show that the scores ofcompositions and the number of lexical chunks in post-test is significantly more thanthose in pre-test, and there is close correlation lying between the use of lexical chunksand composition scores.The conclusion part summarizes findings of the study and points out thesignificance of lexical chunks in improving English competence of students.Limitations of the present study and recommendations for further study are putforward.