An Empirical Study Of Lexical Chunks In Senior High School English Writing

Writing, the most difficult competences among the four English basic skills-listening, speaking, reading and writing, is undoubtedly an important way of language output. To accomplish the writing task, students are required not only to master a fairly large vocabulary, but to express their ideas in writing fluently. In recent years, English writing has gained greater concern, however, the existing English writing capability of senior high school students could hardly come up to the new standard and embarrassing problems of insufficient vocabulary, Chinglish expressions and inappropriate use of words are some of the major obstacles in the development of their writing skills. So some scholars have been finding a new teaching approach to improve the English writing competence of senior high school.In 1993, Michael Lewis presented lexical approach and viewed lexical chunks as the core of English study. Lexical chunks are the special phenomenon in English, which contain the collocation meaning, grammar structure and pragmatic function. Lexical chunks can ease the memory burden efficiently and improve the language fluency in English writing greatly. Therefore, the author tries to apply lexical approach to the English teaching of senior high school to verity that lexical chunks will improve the English writing competence of senior high students.The author carried out an experiment in the Zhenjiang Senior High school and 97 students involved. The experiment time lasted for about four months. Before the experiment, the author managed to get some latest information of students’ strategies of English writing and their attitudes towards lexical chunks in English learning. During the experiment, the author applied lexical approach to the Experimental Group with an emphasis on the use of lexical chunks in the learning process. After the experiment, the author analyzed the writing scores, the numbers of lexical chunks in their pre-test and posttest compositions and then drew a conclusion from the results of interview in the EG that the experiment testifies the effectiveness of lexical chunks in the improvement of English writing competence of senior high students. After the experiment, EG students got higher writing scores, mastered more lexical chunks than Control Group students and fostered better learning habits.