The Application Of Prefabricated Chunks Approach In English Writing Teaching In Junior High Schools

With the prospering of international communication, English is becoming more and more important as a tool of communication. Writing is very easy to be ignored among English basic skills, listening, speaking, reading and writing, especially in junior high schools. When the students complete their English writing, they will often make many kinds of mistakes, such as misspelled words, words chaos and nonsensical situation. Therefore, it causes that the writing competence of students cannot be promoted.In order to solve the problems of English writing, the theory of prefabricated chunks emerges as required. The main purpose of this thesis is to explore a new method which can improve the writing scores of students by applying the teaching method of prefabricated chunks. First of all, prefabricated chunk is a kind of fixed or semi-fixed structure, which is ranged between vocabulary and grammar. It is regarded as a whole and retrieved directly when necessary. Moreover, prefabricated chunk is recognized as the combination of form and function. The users choose different prefabricated chunks depending on the specific context, which can make the language more fluent and idiomatic. The application of prefabricated chunks to second language writing can effectively ease learners’ pressure in time-limited writing, help them overcome negative transfer from their first language, increase language processing efficiency and finally raise learners’ ability of writing more fluent, accurate and native-like compositions.On the account of the characteristics of grammar and pragmatics, the author supposes boldly to make a combination of prefabricated chunks and English writing injunior high schools. In this research,the researcher adopts teaching of prefabricated chunks into process writing through teacher-learner and learner-learner interaction,while guiding the learners to identify, internalize and accumulate writing-related prefabricated chunks,in order to explore a new method of raising learners’ ability of English writing through the bridge of "prefabricated chunks’ ’. In addition, the research pays extra attention to cultivating learners’ learning strategy of lexical chunks in the hope of promoting learners’ autonomous learning ability in English writing.Consequently, it aims to solve the problems as follows:1. After the application of prefabricated chunks, which aspects of writing do the students improve?2. After accepting the teaching method of prefabricated chunks, how do the students change their attitudes towards English writing?This paper mainly adapts the instruments of writing experiment, questionnaire and interview. The subjects of the study are two classes who are at the same level in a senior high school for one semester. In each class, there are 40 students. One is regarded as the experimental class(EG), the other is the control class(CG). CG adapted the teaching material “go for it !” which is published in PEP. There are different modules in this book, so the teacher designs the teaching plans to make the students understand, absorb and internalize the prefabricated chunks. In this research, there are totally six processing writing. At the end of the experiment, the author makes a sharp comparison between the first writing score and the last one by using SPSS.According to the results of the comparison between pretest scores and post test scores. The results of the research show that :1.After the application of the prefabricated chunks teaching method, the English writing scores of the EG students are significantly improved and the English writing scores of the CG are slightly increased.2.After experiment, students’ attitudes towards English writing has obviously change.Furthermore, most of the EG students hold a positive attitude towards English writing.Therefore, it is a wise choice to introduce prefabricated chunks into English Writing Teaching in senior high schools.