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

The “ordinary high school English Curriculum Standard(Experiment)” and the college entrance examination make high requirements of English writing, but English writing teaching in high school is not satisfactory. Becker first put forward the theory of the Lexical Approach in 1975 and it has been gradually accepted by more and more foreign language teachers. It has been found that lexical chunks have a lot of advantages in English writing teaching. The teaching of lexical chunks can help students use lexical chunks as the basic unit. The lexical chunks can be used to combine context. The overall extraction and utilization of lexical chunks can help improve the fluency of students’ English writing.In the present study, the author adopts teaching of lexical chunks in different stages of text teaching, aiming to improve the effectiveness of writing teaching.Senior two students from two natural classes from Suzhou Industrial Park No.2 Middle School are selected as participants, one of which is treated as the experimental group while the other one is the control group. The experimental group is taught by the lexical approach whereas the control group is still taught in a traditional way. After the one-term experiment, the data from the tests, questionnaires and interviews are collected and analyzed.The results of the experiment show that1) The teaching of lexical chunks can raise students’ awareness of identifying and using lexical chunks.2) The teaching of lexical chunks can obviously improve the students’ writing competence.3) The teaching of lexical chunks can effectively increase the students’ interest in writing and improve their self-confidence in writing in English.