Application Of Lexical Chunks To The Teaching Of English Writing In Senior High Schools

English writing is an important skill in language acquisition, and the level of writing isan important index for English ability of English learners. However, English writing is stillvery difficult for most Chinese senior high students who have learned English for several years.Therefore, how to improve English writing level of senior high school students is a bigproblem for English teachers in high school. With the development of corpus linguistics inrecent years, researchers have found a new type of language structure, which is the lexicalchunk. Since then a great deal of attention has been paid to this language structure. Theadvantage of lexical chunk lies in its combination of vocabulary, grammar and context. As alanguage structure that has form and function, lexical chunk is a feasible way for the use ofvocabulary. Existing research has demonstrated that lexical chunks play an important role inEnglish writing teaching, as it can effectively improve the efficiency of processing languageinformation, overcome the negative transfer of mother tongue, and alleviate learners’ pressureof timed writing. These effects can improve the fluency, accuracy and idiomaticity of students’writing. For this reason, teachers should make the most of lexical chunks’ advantages inimproving foreign language teaching. Based on these advantages, this thesis points out andtries to apply lexical chunks in the teaching of English writing in high schools.Based on the research findings of lexical chunk both at home and abroad, this thesis aimsto examine whether applying lexical chunks in the teaching of English writing can optimizeteacher’s teaching and students’ writing. Furthermore, the thesis discusses the effective ways toapply lexical chunks in the teaching of English writing. After theorising, this thesis elaboratesand designs an experiment to test and verify the validity and credibility of the conclusion. In thisstudy, two classes of Senior One in Xiang Ji Middle School are chosen as the study groups. Inorder to discuss the feasibility of applying lexical chunks approach to the teaching of Englishwriting in middle schools, the teaching experiment continued for one semester in Class271andClass272. After the experiment, the raw data was input into SPSS21.0the statistic software foranalyses. The results of these analyses show that, the marks of students’ writing in the experiment group obviously increased, but those in the control group remained the same. Bycomparing pre-test compositions with post-test ones, the thesis finds that lexical chunk is ofgreat value in improving the accuracy and richness of vocabulary as well as fluency andidiomaticity of the students’ writing. The analysis above fully proves that applying the lexicalchunks approach to the teaching of English writing is feasible and effective. Finally, the thesiscomes up with some suggestions that may help to apply lexical chunks in the teaching ofEnglish writing more effectively, thereby enabling lexical chunks to play a more positive andeffective role in the teaching of high schools’ English writing.