A Case Study Of Impacts Of Lexical Chunks Teaching On IELTS Academic Writing Ability

As a tool for international communication, English is becoming more and moreimportant. In China, teaching of English has become increasingly important. Theteaching of lexical chunks is a language teaching theory which for the purpose ofapplication. The most significant principle is “language consists of grammaticalizedlexis rather than lexicalized grammar”. In short, language is composed of lexicalchunks, not by traditional views of grammar and vocabulary. In recent years, the roleof lexical chunks in teaching of English writing has received an increasing attentionfrom experts in language teaching, the importance of chunks in English writingteaching is attracting more and more interest. Studying on lexical chunks applicationin English writing is to help people get better understanding of this languagephenomenon, and using it in the process of learning and teaching properly andeffectively. Although the study of lexical chunks sustained attention from abroad andin domestic, researches from abroad mainly focus on the following aspects: lexicalchunks recognition and input, application and efficiency of lexical approach. Whiledomestic researches of lexical chunks mainly concern as follows: relationshipbetween lexical chunks theory and ESL writing, affection of lexical approach onstudents’ English writing ability, relevance between context and lexical chunksteaching. Obviously, the above researches are mostly study application and impacts oflexical approach on English writing. Though there is an agreement that lexicalapproach has a great effect on English writing, few studies have discussed itsinfluence on students’IELTS academic writing ability.Base on the theory of lexical chunks, this study talks about the impacts of lexicalchunks teaching on IELTS academic writing ability. The IELTS academic samplewriting tasks are adopted to collect data for quantitative analysis. By comparing thetraditional teaching method and the lexical chunks teaching method, this study tries toexplore the difference of the impacts on writing ability under those two teachingmethods. The main purpose of this research is to confirm the effect of input lexical chunks in classroom teaching, and achieve further understanding of specific aspectswhich have been influenced by lexical chunks teaching. At the same time, teacherscan get more profound understanding of the role of lexical approach in improvingstudents’ English writing ability. As a result, this study provides important referencefor how to carry out effective teaching in IELTS academic writing lesson.The present study briefly delineates the research background, it adopts IELTSacademic writing test to complete data collection and then through statistical methodand quantitative analysis to investigate the differences in improving IELTS academicwriting ability by comparing traditional teaching method and lexical chunks approach.This study aims to explore the impacts of lexical chunks teaching on IELTS academicwriting abilityIn order to study the research problems, this research selected40students whocome from IELTS writing classes in a training school as subject, and those subjectswere divided into two groups: Experiment Group (EG) and Control Group (CG). TheEG adopted lexical chunks teaching method, while control group used traditionalteaching methods, by comparing scores of pretest and posttest, the results wereacquired.Through discussion of the results, the major findings of this study are as follows:firstly, it is feasible and important to use lexical approach to improve accuracy ofstudents’ IELTS academic writing and validity of expression. Secondly, if teachersdesign classroom activities under the principles of lexical approach to encouragestudents to use lexical chunks by conscious, they can obtain more effect in improvingstudent’s writing ability at the same time. What is more, teachers can reach goals oflanguage teaching more smoothly. Finally, by employing lexical chunks teaching inIELTS academic writing lessons, students’ integrity and semantic coherence of thesentences have been improved. Moreover, it can save students’ time of languageoutput, and improve their English communication ability.Finally, limitations can be found in the present research. This study is only atentative step towards the teaching of IELTS academic writing, aiming of improvingIELTS academic writing even EFL writing, more researches are needed to be implemented and perfected in the future. What is more, lexical chunks play asignificant role not only in IELTS academic writing, but also listening, speaking andreading. Therefore, it requires more quantitative and qualitative studies in this field.The teachers are supposed to be more involved in the research of more effectiveIELTS academic writing teaching approaches.