The Application Of The Lexical Chunks To English Writing Teaching In High Middle School

As one of the inseparable components of language skills, the importance of English writing is self-evident. However, there are many serious problems existing in the current teaching of English writing, writing is stilla weak link in the process of English teaching.Following the lexical view of language, linguists like Lewis advanced a new approach-the lexical approach. The lexical approach has theoretically proved that focusing on lexical chunks in language teaching and learning is effective for learners’ language development, but it needs empirical studies to prove its true value in the practical teaching process. The present study aims to investigate the present situation of students’ lexical chunk awareness and examine the underlying relationship between lexical chunk and English writing.The present study aims to testify the effectiveness of lexical chunks in English writing. The author chooses two intact classes’ students in class 9,senior two and class 10, senior in XX Middle School as the subjects, with fifty students in each class. The whole experiment lasted for two months. To ensure the homogeneity of the two classes, the pretest was conducted before experiment. The testing material was chosen from the National Matr iculat ion English Test paper of Gansu province. Meanwhile, based on the Nattinger&Decarrico’s classification of lexical chunks and Huang Yan’s questionnaire on testing high school students’ lexical chunk awareness, a questionnaire was developed. This questionnaire was also conducted before experiment to investigate the students’ lexical chunk awareness. During the study, various kinds of lexical chunk related activities were designed in the teaching process of the experiment class.When it comes to the control class, the grammar translation method was applied. In the posttest period, a writing test which was chosen from National Matriculat ion English Test of Gansu province in 2014, all of the subjects participated in this study. The purpose of the posttest is to testify the effectiveness of lexical chunks in English writing. All of the subjects’ testing papers were marked by two experienced teachers in the English group with strict accordance of criteria for marking national matriculation English papers. Based on the analysis of questionnaires and students’ writing materials in the pretest and posttest period, the following conclusions can be drawn:(1)More than 50% of the students’ lexical awareness is relat ively low, students’ learning of lexical chunks is far from systematic. In other words, most of the students did not attach importance to the accumulation of lexical chunks. On the other hand, most of the students remember the lexical chunks in isolat ion with the context. All of the above mentioned facts suggest that learners’ awareness of lexical chunks is relatively low and learning of lexical chunks is far from systematic.(2) The statistical results show that compared with the pretest writing scores, the experimental class achieved significant progress. By analyzing the students’ English writings in the experimental class, it can be seen that the number of lexical chunks which were used by the students in the experimental class was higher than that in the control class. In addition,the frequency and the quality of the writings in the experimental class are all higher compared with that of the control class. All in all, the application of the lexical chunks can significantly improve students’ English writings.Last but not least, the sixth part contains the conclusions of this study, the implications and lim itations are also being discussed.