An Experimental Study Of Lexical Chunk Approach To English Writing Teaching In Senior High Schools

As we all know, there are four basic language skills in SLA including: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. As an important output skill, writing has been the indispensable and difficult point of senior high school English teaching. Besides, both of the New English Curriculum Standards and the College Entrance Examination raise high requirements for English writing. But there still exist many problems in current senior high school writing teaching, such as the limited teaching time, lacking the guidance of writing methods, numerous grammar mistakes and monotonous vocabularies in students’ compositions as well as students’ negative attitudes towards writing. The author thinks the traditional English teaching methods need to be improved in current English teaching.In recent years, the development of lexical chunk theory provides us a good method to improve the teaching of English writing. In 1975, the term “idiosyncratic chunk” was first put forward by Becker. Lexical chunk is an aggregation of grammar, meaning and context. Chunks can be stored integrally and extracted directly from the memory without considering too many grammar rules. The lexical chunk approach was first presented by Lewis and his associates in 1993. This is a new teaching method which draws more and more attention of linguists and teachers. Its basic principle is language consists of grammaticalized lexis, not lexicalized grammar.(Lewis, 1993:89) Based on the status quo of English writing, this thesis applies Lewis’ s lexical chunk approach into teaching practice and verifies the following two hypotheses through an experiment.(1)The lexical chunk approach arouses students’ interest and strengthens their confidence in English writing.(2) Students’ writing performance gets promoted after the implementation of the lexical chunk approach.In order to verify these hypotheses, the author adopts the experimental method. Senior one students of two natural classes from Shi Jiazhuang Foreign Language School are selected as participants, one of which is treated as the experimental class while the other one is considered to be the control class. In the EC, the lexical chunk approach is implemented. Lexical chunks mainly come from the textbooks supplemented by teacher’s complement and accumulation of students’ reading and exercises after class. Besides, students are expected to recognize, recite, consolidate and apply chunks independently. Meanwhile, the teacher checks students and helps them build up their lexical chunks database. In the CC, the teacher adopts the traditional teaching method without emphasizing chunks.The author carries out questionnaire surveys, interviews and writing tests before and after the experiment. The result of tests shows that composition scores of students and lexical chunks used in compositions in EC get improved significantly. And the data of questionnaire surveys and interviews show students’ interest and confidence is motivated as well. Therefore, we can draw a conclusion that the lexical chunk approach is effective in senior high school teaching and can enhance students’ writing proficiency.