The Application Of Lexical Chunk Approach In Improving The Students' English Writing Proficiency In Senior High School

Lexical chunk is a multi-word unit which is between word and sentence, a coalition of grammar, context and meaning. It has relatively fixed form. Producing discourses through the use of lexical chunks and lexical chunk schema can not only overcome negative transfer of native language but also can improve the efficiency of language information processing and make the language more fluent and authentic, thereby, facilitate the improvement of students' writing proficiency. In recent years, some scholars have researched the application of lexical chunk approach in English writing teaching, but majority of them focus on the feasibility and effectiveness. From the perspective of discourse, the author verified the previous research results and further discussed the specific implementation of lexical chunk approach in improving the students' composition writing proficiency.Through the analysis of the theories related to lexical chunk, lexical chunk schema and discourse, the relationship between lexical chunk and discourse cohesion as well as discourse coherence were expounded. And the author put forward three questions:1) Can the lexical chunk approach improve the students'general proficiency in English composition writing?2) Whether positive correlation exists between the number of lexical chunks applied and the writing proficiency? If so, what's the situation of different types of lexical chunks usage?3) Can the lexical chunk approach enhance the discourse cohesion and coherence? If so, how does it work?To find the answers of the questions above, an instructional experiment was carried out for a semester in two arts classes in Lvliang Advanced Experimental High School. Class 1409 is the control class with 25 girls and 20 boys. Class 1407 is the experimental class with 24 girls and 19 boys. The author applied lexical chunk approach in EC. It mainly consists of two parts, lexical chunk input in text reading and lexical chunk output in composition writing. While, the conventional approach was applied in CC. The author collected the data of the results of pre-test and post-test and analyzed them by taking advantage of SPSS software. Different types of lexical chunks applied in tests were compared to learn the impact of different approaches on writing proficiency. Besides, two composition samples of a student were analyzed through a coherent point of view in detail. At the end of the experiment,8 students in EC were picked out randomly to have an interview.The research got a conclusion as follows:1) The application of lexical chunk approach can improve the students'general proficiency in composition writing.2) There is a significant positive correlation between the number of lexical chunks applied and the writing proficiency. What's more, among the four types of lexical chunks, phrase constrains are employed the most by the students, followed by polywords.3) The application of lexical chunk approach contributes to the enhancement of discourse cohesion and coherence. Both of the quantity and quality of lexical chunks applied in post-test in EC have made a great progress.