An Empirical Study On The Relationship Between Prefabricated Chunks And English Writing In Senior High School

Since the New Curriculum Standards imposes a higher requirement for Chinese students’ writing ability, English writing has emerged as an important test item in National Matriculation English Test. However, based on her teaching experiences, the author found it hard to improve high school students’ writing ability. Recent research on prefabricated chunks both at home and abroad has shown that prefabricated chunks play an important role in improving college students’ writing ability, and the author wonders whether the teaching of prefabricated chunks in high school will exert a positive influence on students’ writing ability.This paper is thus aimed at exploring the relationship between prefabricated chunks and high school students’ writing ability. Two research questions are addressed:(1) Can the classroom teaching of prefabricated chunks help improve the students’ writing ability?(2) What is the correlation between the number of prefabricated chunks used and the writing scores?To answer the above questions, two parallel classes of Senior 2 students were chosen as participants from a four-star level high school in Suzhou, with one class treated as experimental group and the other control group. Altogether, 134 copies of writing were collected before and after the classroom teaching of prefabricated chunks. According to Nattinger&Decarrico’s(2000) categorization of prefabricated chunks, the author counted and analyzed the number of prefabricated chunks used in writing by using SPSS 19. Data analyses, including T-tests of writing scores between experimental group and control group and the correlation analysis between the number of prefabricated chunks and writing scores, yield the following findings.(1) After the experiment, the students from experimental group got higher scores than those from control group. That is to say, compared with traditional English teaching method, prefabricated chunks teaching plays a more effective role in enhancing high school students’ English writing ability.(2) A positive correlation was found between the number of prefabricated chunks used and the students’ writing scores. This indicates that the more prefabricated chunks the students use in writing, the higher the scores.