An Action Research On The Effects Of Theme-based Lexical Chunks Input On Senior High School Students' English Writing

Writing plays a very important part in foreign language learning.It plays an essential role in improving students' English language skills,and in examining students' comprehensive language proficiency.However,English writing has always been a challenge for most Chinese students.Though most learners have studied English for years,their writing proficiency is still low.Insufficiency of vocabulary,monotonous sentence patterns,lack of coherence,Chinglish expressions etc.,are common in their compositions.Lexical chunks are larger linguistic units and appear in real communication very frequently.Researches show that no less than eighty percent of natural language consists of lexical chunks.They can be stored and retrieved as a whole from our memory.Lexical chunks are ideal language teaching units which combine grammatical rules,semantic rules and pragmatic contexts as a whole body,making it the best pattern to be acquired,memorized,stored and produced.Helping students to learn and use lexical chunks will lead to better language output.Therefore,it is believed that lexical chunks has a promising future of application in the teaching of English writing.In addition,the author notices that senior high school English textbooks are arranged according to different themes,and that there are a large number of theme-related lexical chunks.Related Researches show that theme teaching can optimize the way and increase the amount of language input.It will be more convenient for students if the lexical chunks can be accumulated according to different themes.Students can also recall theme-related lexical chunks and organize discourse more quickly and accurately in their writing,especially under the pressure of time limit in tests.Therefore,the author tried to combine theme teaching with lexical chunks input to form a new teaching model---theme-based lexical chunks input teaching.Then the author conducted this action research from September 2016 to December 2016 to explore the effects of theme-based lexical chunks input on English writing of senior high school students.The research is expected to answer two questions:(1)Can theme-based lexical chunks input help senior high school students improvetheir English writing performance?(2)What effects does theme-based lexical chunks input have on the use of lexicalchunks in the English writing of senior high school students?The action research lasted for 16 weeks and 40 students in Grade Two from Dongjiang Senior High School participated in it.The author adopted the combination of the qualitative and quantitative method.At the beginning,the author introduced and explained the general knowledge of lexical chunks to students,in order to cultivate their awareness of recognizing lexical chunks.Then,the teaching mode of theme-based lexical chunks input was carried out.The first round of action research lasted for 6 weeks.Based on the analysis of midterm writing test,interviews,classroom observation and teaching journals,the author reflected on her teaching in order to make a revised plan for the second round.The second round lasted for 9 weeks.Both qualitative and quantitative data were collected and analyzed for research questions.According to the results of writing tests,interviews,classroom observation and teaching journals,we can draw a conclusion that theme-based lexical chunks input does help to improve the senior high school students' English writing performance.It can also facilitate the use of lexical chunks in their English writing in terms of numbers,richness and accuracy of lexical chunks.This action research is beneficial to further the application of lexical chunks in English writing teaching,providing inspiration and enlightenment to English teachers.