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

Writing is an indispensable part of English language skills for students in junior middle schools. Compulsory Education English Curriculum Standards also give specific requirements on the contents and levels of writing. But in fact, the level of English writing in junior middle schools is still lower because of lack of vocabulary, training, writing strategy and so on.It is studied that lexical chunks can integrate grammar and meaning together, which has character of generativity and stabilization that can provide large room of how to creatively use words for learners. At the same time, it can also effectively improve the fluency, vitality and authenticity of learners’ language, and help learners structure language and improve learners’ writing ability. Most studies about lexical chunks are based on college students at present. Empirical studies on use and learning of lexical chunks for junior middle school students are less. So my paper aims to study how to introduce lexical chunks teaching approach to the junior middle school’s routine English teaching, and try to probe the utility of lexical chunks teaching approach in junior middle school’s English writing and help students improve writing ability.On the basis of Nattinger & Decarrico、Lewis and Ma Guanghui’s lexical chunks classification, the subject of this paper is the students of Grade 8(two classes) in Lantian Experimental School of Huaihua,Hunan, and the adopted research approaches are questionnaire, pre-test and post-test compositions. And the author conducts the experiment within sixteen weeks. The study tries to carry out by the following ways: the lexical chunks teaching approach is only taught in the experimental class with the emphasis of students’ recognizing and understanding of lexical chunks in or out of class reading. The teacher designs various lexical chunks exercises to consolidate them, and the students do limited-time writing training once two weeks. And the teacher helps students output lexical chunks creatively, then the teacher checks their compositions and explains the example composition for students, finally lets students rethink and digest all lexical chunks. While the controlled class still adopts traditional method, such as vocabulary use explanation, grammar analysis and so on.After the experiment, the author adopts statistic software SPSS17.0 to test students’ pre-test and post-test compositions and find out that the students in the experiment class have had an obvious rising awareness that they try to use lexical chunks in the English writing and have obviously improved the interest on writing. And the grammar error, collocation error, context error and express error are less. The data in the experiment show that, whether compared to participants in controlled class or compared to itself, the participants in experimental class get advances in the number of lexical chunks, genres of lexical chunks, and different writing ability indexs. This study shows that the application of lexical chunks teaching approach to English writing in junior middle schools is feasible and effective.