A Case Study Of Situational Chunk-based Teaching Impact On The English Senior High Students’ Writing Ability

Writing, an important aspect of basic language skills and communication ability, is not stressed in English teaching. There exist lots of problems in writing of College Entrance Examination such as expression, connection, vocabulary and grammar. The key to English teaching is to help students seek for a more suitable learning approach based on their study. Lexical chunks, including the whole sentence can help learners gain more language information and vocabulary at a time compared to the single word. Besides, due to connection with context, lexical chunks will be remembered more easily than single words. There are many empirical studies from junior school to university based on lexical chunks in the past. With the development of teaching, as learners of the second language, the creation of situations is a better choice owing to lack of native language environment. Despite the related studied based on lexical chunks and situations, there’re few studies linked to senior high school students. This thesis explores the input of lexical chunks with the topic situation, aimed at solving the following problems:(1) How does this teaching improve the writing?(2) Which aspects in writing ability will be improved based on this teaching?(3) What’s the difference in uses of lexical chunks compared to the past?Based on Whole Language Approach theory, this thesis uses methods of questionnaires, literature research and experiment. The author chose two parallel classes in a senior high school in Wuxi as the research subjects. One is an experimental class, and the other is a control class. This lexical approach based on topic situation was carried out in the experimental class, while the traditional ways of teaching vocabulary was applied in the other. No significant differences are found in the pretests on the two classes. After two semesters of teaching experiment, using SPSS(17.0) statistics software to analyze the data. The results indicate that(1) This lexical approach improves students’ writing level and builds up students’ writing confidence and interests.(2) This lexical approach based on topic situation, to some extent, improves the accuracy and diversity of language in writing.According to the results of the research, the way to input of the lexical chunks will be suggested. Students’ awareness of using lexical chunks will be strengthened by various exercise based on the context. However, feedback after school is especially important. Arrangement in the class and writing exercise during limited time are also necessary, which help students in the exam.