A Research Into The Effect Of Lexical-chunk Approach On English Sophomores’ Writing Proficiency

Lexical chunk is a special multi-lexical phenomenon, a fixed or semi-fixed formulaic frame, which can usually be stored in people’s permanent memory. Lexical-chunk Approach was first put forward by Lewis in1993, and from then on, many scholars developed this approach by applying it to various language teaching activities, such as listening, speaking, reading and writing. Lexical-chunk Approach offers a new direction for teaching English to students, especially in the aspect of teaching English writing. Numerous researchers and scholars have devoted themselves to theoretical description of this approach, and some have conducted empirical researches on high school students or non-English majors, but few have conducted researches on the effect of Lexical-chunk Approach on English majors’writing, leaving the empirical research a virgin area.In order to fill up this gap, this paper is undertaken to investigate the effect of the use of Lexical-chunk Approach on English Sophomores’writing performance through the experiment, questionnaire and interview. The research questions addressed in this thesis are:1) What is the effect of the use of Lexical-chunk Approach on student’s writing performance? And what is the reason for such effectiveness?2) Which group of students, the high achievers or the low achievers, is more affected by the use of Lexical-chunk Approach? And why?Both quantitative and qualitative methods are adopted in this study.The quantitative research involved a one-semester experiment and a self-designed questionnaire with the whole internal reliability reaching.974. The experiment was carried out from September12th,2013to January9th,2014, which involved60sophomore students majoring in English from College of International Studies in Yangzhou University. The pre-test was carried out in both classes at the beginning of the experiment and found the two classes were of the same writing proficiency level. Class1was set as the control class (CC), and Class2as the experimental class (EC). The two classes were taught by the same writing teacher. The teacher adopted Lexical-chunk Approach in EC while the traditional writing approach--Product-oriented Approach was employed in CC. After a semester of teaching, the post-test was held at the end of the experiment. The scores of both tests were computed and analyzed with the software of Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS)18.0. The differences of the number of lexical chunks in both tests were also analyzed with SPSS18.0. The questionnaires were handed out to the students at nearly the end of the experiment, which was made up of18statements and covered three categories concerning students’motivation, learning autonomy and learning strategies. The data were also analyzed with SPSS18.0.The qualitative research was an interview with14students being selected from EC, half of whose score belonged to high group and the other half belonged to low group. The interview was carried out in Chinese and the whole process was tape-recorded. Afterwards, the results were transcribed into English and the transcriptions of the interview were carefully analyzed.According to the analysis of quantitative and qualitative research, the major findings obtained can be summarized as follows:Firstly, Lexical-chunk Approach proves to be a more effective way to improve students’ English writing proficiency, especially in terms of the structure and language, as Lexical-chunk Approach benefits students by triggering their motivation, fostering their autonomous learning and providing them with more writing strategies. Due to the results of the questionnaire and the interview, most students in EC admit that they have benefited from Lexical-chunk Approach. On one hand, the Lexical-chunk Approach requires students to memorize as many chunks as possible, so they can use these useful chunks in their writing, which reduces their anxiety and develops their self-confidence. On the other hand, Lexical-chunk Approach requires students to have the ability to learn autonomously, which pushes students to memorize the lexical chunks from their reading and writing and to revise their compositions according to the teacher’s feedback. Therefore, students can take charge of their own learning and develop better study habits step by step. What’s more, as it is a skilled job to memorize a large quantity of lexical chunks, students have to use some learning strategies, like meta-cognitive strategies and cognitive strategies to help their memorization of lexical chunks. They spend more time and energy in practicing their writing by using the lexical chunks they have learned in the writing class.Secondly, the high achievers are significantly affected by the use of Lexical-chunk Approach. On one hand, Lexical-chunk Approach requires students’correct memorization of lexical chunks, which makes students spend great efforts memorizing chunks and use them in their writing. Students with higher English language proficiency levels are more likely to fulfill these tasks because these students spend more time learning these lexical chunks and using them in their writing. Therefore, they make more progress in the writing, which in turn motivates their learning. By contrast, low achievers find it difficult to fulfill these tasks because they have fewer lexical chunks stored in their mind and they are more likely to confuse these lexical chunks with each other due to the similarities within these chunks, which makes them difficult to memorize a large quantity of lexical chunks correctly. Therefore, these low achievers tend to use fewer lexical chunks in their writing. Even if they use some lexical chunks in their writing, there may be full of mistakes because of the incorrect memorization of lexical chunks, which in turn reduces their interest and confidence in writing. On the other hand, Lexical-chunk Approach calls for students’learning autonomy and self-monitoring strategies in learning, which makes students learn more effectively. High achievers usually have better learning habits and use more learning strategies to memorize more lexical chunks in the writing class under the guidance of the teacher. Moreover, high achievers tend to revise their writing again and again before they hand in their writing to the teacher. However, low achievers may find it difficult to learn to write by themselves. They do not know how to monitor their writing, and have no idea of revising their writing. They only depend on the teacher’s feedback and will put aside their writing after finishing it, which makes them passive and finally contributes to their less improvement.In light of the findings, this paper makes some pedagogical implications both for teachers and students. For teachers, they should get students to realize the importance and practical value of lexical chunks through systematically introducing these chunks to them in the writing class. Besides, teachers should pay more attention to the low achievers, encourage them to use good strategies to memorize lexical chunks and give them more instruction to their compositions. For students, they must manage the time and spare no efforts in learning lexical chunks and try to improve their writing.