Research On Application Of Lexical Chunks To Senior High School English Writing Teaching

In China, English writing is a skill that has been neglected in English language teaching in senior high schools. But recently, more and more communication is done by the Internet and more and more work is done by writing, teachers and students have noticed the importance of improving their writing skills. However, for students, writing is still the hardest skill to acquire among the four basic skills. The reason is that writing is not simply memorizing the vocabulary, practicing grammar exercises or understanding the meaning. It requires students to internalize what they have learned and then produce language creatively. It is much more complex than the other three skills. Therefore, it’s necessary for teachers to find an effective way to improve students’ writing ability.With the development of corpus linguistics, researchers and scholars begin to pay attention to lexical chunks in language use, because language users do not always process language word by word, but make use of lexical chunks(Altenberg & Granger, 2001; Carter & Nunan, 2002; Wray, 1999, 2000). Lexical chunks are frequently used fixed or semi-fixed phrases with functional meanings(Nattinger & De Carrico, 1992), which are stored and retrieved automatically as a whole unit(Wray, 1999) in the process of language learning. Based on the advantages of lexical chunks, it has been successfully applied to English writing teaching. These studies prove that lexical chunks have a positive effect on improving students’ English competency(Diao Linlin, 2004; Ding Yanren & Qi Yan, 2005; Ma Guanghui, 2009, 2011; Zhang Xia, 2010). But the previous studies are mostly on college students, and senior high school students are not the major research subject. In this study, the author tries to apply lexical chunks to English writing teaching in Huangzhou No.1 Senior High School, and investigates the following questions: 1) Can the application of lexical chunks to English writing teaching improve the students’ writing ability? 2) What are the differences between the experiment class and the control class on the quality and frequency of lexical chunks used in compositions? 3) What are the differences on the use of the five categories of lexical chunks in compositions between the two classes?The thesis is composed of six chapters. The first chapter introduces the background, purposes of the study and the overall structure of the whole paper. Chapter Two reviews the related overseas and domestic literature in this field. Chapter Three introduces the theoretical framework of lexical chunks from cognitive and linguistic aspects. Chapter Four describes the research design: the experiment of 90 students designated randomly coming from Class Six(the experiment class) and Class Eight(the control class) of Huangzhou No.1 Senior High School, 45 students in each class. Before the experiment, the students are required to take the pre-test. Then the experiment of applying lexical chunks in English writing teaching is conducted in Class Six. The whole experiment has been divided into three stages: recognizing lexical chunks, applying lexical chunks and consolidating application of lexical chunks. But Class Eight still adopts the traditional teaching method, which mainly focuses on vocabulary and grammatical rules. After the experiment, all the compositions were collected and the number of lexical chunks in them was entered into SPSS 19.0 for analysis. The detailed discussion will be presented in Chapter Five. By comparing the scores in the two tests, we can find that applying lexical chunks to senior high school English writing teaching can improve students’ writing ability. By comparing the numbers and frequency of lexical chunks used in compositions between the two classes, we can see that the students in experiment class used more lexical chunks than control class. What’s more, among five categories of lexical chunks, students in experiment class used more collocations and sentence frames and heads, while there is no appreciable improvement in control class. Apart from the above, we find that both of the students in experiment class and control class are not good at using poly-words when they produce language. Based on the results of this study, Chapter Six sums up the major findings, and also gives the following suggestions: 1) developing the students’ awareness of lexical chunks; 2) organizing classroom activities with practice of lexical chunks; 3) promoting students’ autonomous learning of lexical chunks. This part also includes the limitations of this research and the issues that need future exploring.