The Empirical Research Of Lexical Chunks Theory On English Writing In Junior Middle School

As a basic, important and difficult point, vocabulary mastery is of great significance in the process of language acquisition. Recently, theories of Lexical Chunk Approach have been adopted as a new pedagogical perspective into researches of language teaching. The theory is a new language teaching theory which is based on the background of the application of foreign language teaching and learning. Lexical chunks, as the minimum unit of language input, memory, storage and output. Being or having the character of lexical and grammatical. They can be stored in human’s memory system as a unified whole and be retrieved directly when necessary. In the actual application of lexical chunks to English writing, it can effectively ease learners’ pressure in time-limited writing. And help them overcome negative transfer from their mother language, increase language processing efficiency and raise of more fluent, accurate and native-like compositions.This study based on output theory, lexical chunks approach and cognitive psychology theory. It proves that applying lexical chunks to English writing teaching in middle schools has a very good and practical worth. In this study, the researcher guides students to learn lexical chunks related to writing by a series of input activities such as identification, assimilation, accumulation, and so on. Meanwhile, the researcher puts Lexical Chunks Approach into writing process through teacher-learner’s and learner-learner’s interaction, discussion and evaluation, and guides the students to extract, modify, output, and consolidate lexical chunks.In order to open a new way for the English writing teaching, it is a necessary to build a bridge "lexical chunks" between input and output of language of writing. Based on the above analysis, the author takes two parallel classes of Grade Eight in Yangshan middle school as the research object, each class has sixty students, and tried to apply Lexical Chunks Theory to English writing teaching. The experiment lasted for one semester. One class takes lexical chunks as the main line to carry out the teaching activities, the other is generally taught in the traditional way. Then make a comparison analysis about these two classes, from which can we know whether different teaching methods produced different influences on the results of students’ English writing, and the paper also explored the relevance between the use of lexical chunks and English writing level.After careful design and rigorous scientific data analysis, we have the following findings:1. The learning of lexical chunks can obviously raise middle school students’ writing abilities. Through the experiment, the quantity of lexical chunks of students in experimental class (EC) increased greatly, and the students’ writing scores in EC were significantly higher than that in control class (CC).2. The Lexical Chunks Approach can effectively improve learners’ interest in English writing and their autonomous learning abilities. In the experiment, the strategy of lexical chunks learning can stimulate students’ interest in English writing and their self-confidence in learning English.