Empirical Study On Relationship Between The Use Of Prefabricated Chunk And The Writing Proficiency Of The Non-english Major

Among the four basic skills of English: Listening,Speaking,Reading and Writing,the writing level of students is one of the most important standards to evaluate their English level.However,after the researcher's observation,the non-English majors are extremely weak in writing.The reasons are various,but the key factor lies in the traditional teaching method used by teacher during the process of teaching writing.In the traditional class,teacher always helps students to accumulate vocabularies through explanation,hoping that it can improve students' writing ability.But under the situation,the sentences produced by students are broken and incoherent.In recent years,with the deeper research on the prefabricated chunk,people find that it plays a vital role in English writing,which provides a new direction of English writing teaching.With the foundation of Nattinger & DeCarrico's classification(1992)and the guideline of Michael Lewis' s Lexical Approach(1993),the researcher aims to help the non-English majors to multiple the prefabricated chunks and apply them in writing through several steps: recognition,input,practice,consolidation,accumulation and output.During the specific research process,the research adopts the pretest,posttest and questionnaire mainly to analyze the function of prefabricated chunk in writing teaching,in order to guarantee the objectivity and accuracy of the research.The research is designed to explore: what changes will happen on the non-English major's chunk level and writing level with the application of prefabricated chunk into writing? And whether the number of prefabricated chunks used in students' composition will change ? In addition,the question: which type of prefabricated chunk will influence the writing level most? also will be discussed in the future.The concrete research questions are the following:1).With the application of prefabricated chunks,what influence will be brought on non-English major students' chunk level and writing level ?2).If students' writing level is improved,what changes on the number of prefabricated chunks used in the composition will happen? And which type of prefabricated chunk has the biggest influence on students' writing level?3).After the teaching experiment,what is the students' attitude toward the lexical approach? And what pedagogical implication the teacher can get?The subject are the students of two classes from Business College of Shanxi University(BCSU),majoring in tourism management,and the number of class C and class D are 41 and 45 respectively.During the whole semester,the prefabricated chunks are used in the experimental group while the control class still use the traditional method.Before and after the experiment,two prefabricated chunk tests and writing tests will be conducted in the two classes.The result of experiment will be explained through SPSS.At the end of experiment,the students in experimental group will be asked to finish a questionnaire.The finding of teaching experiment is: the application of prefabricated chunk in writing can improve students' chunk and writing level.And with the improvement of chunk level,the number of chunk used in experimental group students' compositions increases correspondingly and the sentence builder is the one which makes great contribution to writing's enhancement among the four types.On the other hand,the questionnaire shows that the students' attitude toward the prefabricated chunk is positive and most students even agree that the teacher should use the method in the next term.At the end of research,the suggestion on prefabricated chunk teaching and further study also is proposed.In fact,a great number of study related to present research are undertaken in the past,but the focuses of the earlier works are theory.The present study differs from the previous study to some degree that it's effective to understand how the prefabricated chunks are used in writing practically.