A Study On The Application Of The Prefabricated Chunks In College English Writing Teaching

As an essential skill of second language acquisition(SLA), English writing has become an indispensable part in college English teaching. The level of students’ English writing can directly reflect their overall level of English language. However, in college English teaching, although teachers and scholars have tried many different ways to improve students’ writing proficiency, due to the limitation of vocabulary,negative transfer of mother tongue and lack of English writing skills, students still feel difficult to write a good essay and the writing teaching only get a little improvement.Therefore, it is necessary to find an effective approach to enhance students’ writing proficiency.In this thesis, the author adopts the prefabricated chunks teaching approach to take place of the traditional teaching approach and hopes to find a new way to improve college students’ writing achievement. “Prefabricated chunks”, proposed by Becker(1975), refers to a special kind of multi-word in English, which has the characteristics of both vocabulary and grammar. They are stored in memory as a whole and can be extracted directly when being used, which is beneficial for the accuracy and idiomaticity of the output language. Hence, in order to prove the feasibility of applying prefabricated chunks teaching approach to college English writing, the author makes an attempt to apply prefabricated chunks teaching approach into real class teaching on the basis of previous theories and researches in order to truly improve college students’ writing achievement. This research aims at answering the following two questions:1. What effect does the prefabricated chunks have on students’ attitude towards English writing?2.What’s the relationship between prefabricated chunks and the achievement of student’s English writing?The participants of this experiment are 86 sophomores from Liao Ning Science and Technology College in Jin Zhou, who are major in accounting. They are named as experimental class(EC) and control class(CC) randomly. EC adopts prefabricated chunks teaching approach to teach writing, while CC applies the traditional product approach. The experiment lasts one semester. At the beginning and the end of the experiment, the author collects data through questionnaires, tests and an interview. Then the data are analyzed and discussed by SPSS 17.0.The research results show that the prefabricated chunks teaching approach has a positive effect on students’ learning attitude to English writing. It can not only inspire students’ interest to English writing, but also can enrich students’ writing content, reduce written errors and improve their writing achievement. At last, the researcher points out the limitations of this experiment and give some suggestions for further researchers.