An Application Of Chunk-based Teaching Model In The English Writing Instruction For Adult Students

English writing, as a comprehensive skill of applying the basic knowledge of English, has a high requirement for learners’ vocabulary, grammar, reasoning, and creative thinking; so it is a daunting task to low English proficiency learners who have deficient lexical and grammatical knowledge. As consideration can be hardly given to both writing techniques and students’ basic knowledge of English in traditional classroom writing instruction, it is difficult for these students to make progress in English writing, which makes them lose confidence and interest easily.Researches on chunks in English writing in recent years give a direction to solve the writing problems of low English proficiency learners. Chunks are relatively fixed expressions generated from social communication contexts, which are retrieved from memory as wholes. With a large storage of chunks, people don’t have to generate every sentence by grammatical rules. So chunks help improve language fluency. In written discourse, there are also a large amount of chunks which help express meanings and organize structures. Theoretically, grasping chunks related to writing contexts can help lower the barriers of students’lexical and grammatical deficiency and improve the accuracy and fluency of their written expressions.This study further explores application of chunks into English writing instruction for vocational college students on the basis of previous studies. A chunk-based English writing instruction model for vocational college students is designed and tentatively applied to20adult students of vocational college in a12-week action research, for the purpose of increasing students’interest and confidence in writing and improving their writing performance. Research instruments include tests, questionnaires and interviews. Firstly, according to students’ performance in the English writing class in the last semester, the author initially identifies students’ problems in English writing and speculates possible reasons. Secondly, pre-questionnaire and pre-test are employed to help further identify the problems and reasons behind the problems. Then, the author designs an action plan of the chunk-based English writing instruction model and employs it into the teaching practice. In the middle of the plan, the author verifies the plan according to classroom observation notes of the first six weeks and the result of the interview in the sixth week. At the end of the action, post-test, post-questionnaire and interview are employed to collect data. Aggregated data both at the beginning and at the end of the action research are analyzed to draw a conclusion. The result shows that the chunk-based English writing instruction model can help low proficiency students increase their interest and confidence in English writing and effectively improve their writing performance, specifically in grammar, organization, form and register, and vocabulary.