An Empirical Study On Lexical Chunk Approach To English Writing Of Junior Middle School

Most Chinese students can not write a satisfactory composition under traditionalteaching system. One of the main reason is that traditional teaching method separates wordsteaching from grammar teaching, so that students can not combine isolated words intogrammatical and authentic sentences. Due to this problem, some researchers inroduced lexicalchunk approach into English writing.However, most researches about the relationship between lexical chunk approach andEnglish writing at present mainly focus on theoretical studies, in which only a few empiricalstudies involved. Moreover, those empirical studies only deal with the writing situation ofcollege students who belong to advanced learners, but are not involved in junior middleschools. Thus, the effectiveness of previous findings to the elementary learners remainsdoubtful. Therefore, the author tries to put lexical chunk approach into English writingteaching in middle schools, which aims to explore the influence of lexical chunk approach onEnglish writing performance of junior middle school students, and tries to find out if lexicalchunk approach can enhance students’ interest, confidence and improve English writing level.The subjects are75students from two classes of Grade Two in Dalian NO.107Middle School.Control group consists of37participants, taught with traditional teaching method.Experimental Group includes38participants, taught with lexical chunk approach. Theexperiment methods are questionnaires, pre-test and post-test. The research questions are asfollows:1. If the lexical chunk approach applied to English writing teaching can help raise the writingabilities of junior middle school students?2. How to raise the awareness of students using lexical chunks in English writing?3. If the lexical chunk approach help raise students’ interest and confidence of Englishwriting?The teaching procedure includes three stages: inputting lexical chunks before writing,outputting lexical chunks in writing, apreciating and memorizing lexical chunks after writing.All stages are mainly focus on raising students’ awareness of using lexical chunks, helpingstudents to accumulate, comprehend and memorize lexical chunks effectively and guidingstudents to use lexical chunks appropriately in writing. After four months’ experiment, theauthor analyzes two questionnaires, collects the writing scores and the lexical chunks used instudents’ compositions in pre-test and post-test. The data is analyzed statistically by usingSPSS16.0to conduct a comparative study. Data results show that the students in theexperimental group achieve greater progress, use more lexical chunks and have more interest and confidence towards writing than the students in the control group after the experiment. Itis concluded that lexical chunk approach is helpful to improve the English writingperformance of junior middle school students and enhance their confidence and interest.Finally, the author puts forward some limitations of this study, also along with somesuggestions for further studies.