A Study On The Effectiveness Of Chunk Recitation Application On Senior High School English Writing

Writing, as a very important language output skill, is the key and difficult pointin senior high school English teaching. Both the English New Curriculum Standardand National College Entrance Examination give specific and high requirements onwriting. However, there still exist many problems in the current senior high schoolwriting teaching, such as insufficient teaching time, negative attitudes of studentstowards writing, numerous grammar mistakes, lack of vocabulary and so on. Underthese circumstances, many scholars and teachers are devoted to finding out theapproaches to solve the problems.In1975, lexical chunk was first introduced to English speakers by Becker as anew concept. It is viewed as the combination of semantics, syntax, and context, whichcan be both stored and extracted as a whole. Many researches in this field have provedthat using lexical chunks can help improve the accuracy, fluency and logicalorganization of language, and probably relieve the students of pressure in writing andreduce the negative transfer of our native language, so the students’ writing abilitiescan be enhanced. Nevertheless, the current lexical chunks researches mainly focus onthe college English teaching, while there are only a few such researches concerningsenior high school English teaching. At the same time, recitation, which has so manyadvantages, is the most common method used in our senior high schools. So the aimof my study is to explore whether the combination of lexical chunks and recitation iseffective in senior high school writing teaching.In this case, the author puts up the hypotheses: the combination of lexical chunksand recitation can improve the students’ writing in terms of vocabulary, sentencestructure, grammar, and layout of passage; and eventually, the students’ confidenceand interest in writing can be enhanced. In order to test these hypotheses, the authoradopts the experimental method. In the experimental class, both lexical chunks andthe method of recitation are used with the purpose of cultivating students’ sense oflexical chunks. Lexical chunks mainly come from textbook, supplemented byteacher’s complement and accumulation of students’ reading after class. What’s more, students are expected to choose chunks individually. After recitation, the teacherchecks them and helps students build up their lexical chunks database. Meanwhile,writing exercises are absolutely necessary. The teacher guides students to extractproper chunks and do the timed writing.Moreover, the author carries out surveys, interviews and writing tests before andafter the experiment. Finally, comparing the data from the pre-test and post-test, wecan see that the writing scores of students in the experimental class are significantlyhigher than before the experiment. The quantity of chunks used is increased and thequality is improved. Sentence patterns are more various and the whole layout ofpassage is smoother. The data of surveys and interviews show that students’confidence and interest in writing have been stimulated as well.In conclusion, the combination of lexical chunks and recitation is effective insenior high school writing teaching and can enhance students’ writing abilitiespractically.