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

Writing ability is an important skill in language acquisition, and it can directly reflect the level of English learners. Many high school students have learned English for several years, but they still feel that English writing is very difficult. Though the students memorize a large number of words and phrases, the words and sentences they used in writing do not conform to the expressions of English. Therefore, how to improve high school students’ English writing ability is a common problem that English teachers and students need to solve. With the rapid development of linguistics and related theories, the lexical chunk theory was proposed by linguists and it has attracted great attentions from scholars. Lexical chunk appeared frequently in language communication than the language unit of words, it is a combination of syntax, semantics and context, and have a relatively fixed form. Relevant researches show that lexical chunks play an important role in English writing teaching, it can overcome the adverse effects of negative transfer of mother tongue, to ease the students’ timed writing pressure so as to effectively improve the students’ English writing ability.This study makes a systematic explanation and discussion of lexical theory, and reviews relevant research findings of lexical chunk theory used in language teaching both at home and abroad. On this basis, this empirical study, in which lexical chunk theory is applied to English writing teaching in high school, is conducted.In this study, two classes of Senior One in the Affiliated Middle School of Qinghai Normal University are chosen as the study groups, the experiment lasts one semester. One class is the experimental group and the other is the control group. Lexical chunk approach is adopted in experimental group while traditional teaching method is still used in the control group. Timed writing tests are conducted in experimental group and control group both in their pre-test and post-test of the research. After each test, an experienced English teacher is asked to evaluate compositions according to composition grading standard. The data is analyzed by SPSS software.The results show that the students of experimental group use much more lexical chunks in the post-test than in the pre-test. They can understand and use grammar better, and their writing ability has been improved significantly. Finally, this study puts forward some suggestions for the application of the lexical chunks in English writing teaching so that lexical chunks in English writing teaching can play a more positive and effective role.