Effects Of Fostering Lexical Chunks Awareness On The English Writing Of High School Students:An Empirical Study

This paper has carried out an empirical survey on the effects of awareness of lexical chunks on English writing.In teaching English writing,most teachers are accustomed to the traditional writing method: determining the level of the students’ writing by the final product.Most teachers habitually focus on correcting students’ spelling and neglect the process of training independent thinking capacities.Recently,Wang(2000)proposed the "Length Approach".Similar to that,Shao(2003)studied the effect of task type and condition on EFL writing.However,the effect of those promoted methods seems to be limited.Aimed at improving the process of writing,lexical chunks awareness is conducive to solve the English writing problems for senior high school students and bring implication for writing teaching as well.Lexical chunks are the language phenomenon that occurs frequently in real communication.Lewis(1993),the founder of Lexical Approach,said that language consisted of grammaticalized lexis instead of lexicalized grammar.An important part of language acquisition is the ability to understand and produce words of learners’ integrity.He advocated lexical chunks as basic units of language teaching,stressing the awareness of viewing lexical chunks as a set.He cultivated recognition ability for lexicalchunks,the arrangement and the recording,so as to develop automaticity.Based on lexical semantic relations and syntactic functions,lexical chunks can be divided into four categories: poly-words,high frequency collocations and idiomatic words,institutionalized utterances,and sentences frame.Meanwhile,Language Transfer(Levin and Williams 1970)has been applied in the interlanguage of moving from native language to target language.Lexical chunks act in the form of a sequence to work as positive language transfer and get rid of the simple direct translation and fossilization.By using questionnaires and the experiment,the research unveils students’ existing problems in vocabulary,then advocates students to distinguish lexical chunks,to enhance their awareness so that they become self-independent and take the initiative to construct chunks from memory inventories.Hence,they will naturally reach the requirements of new curriculum standard.Based on the Lexical Approach and Language Transfer,this paper promotes the following questions:Q1: What is the effect of fostering lexical chunks awareness on the production of English phrases in writing?Q2: What is the effect of fostering lexical chunks awareness on the production of clausal chunks in writing?Q3: What is the effect of fostering lexical chunks awareness on the production of discourse organizers in writing?The participants were 90 students from Mingde High School.The pre-test and posttest rater collected students’ writing and counted the different forms of lexical chunks.By using independent samples t test and paired samples t test in the SPSS 17.0,the research investigated the efficacy of lexical chunks’ awareness.After the daily courses,the writing level of both the experiment group and the control group improved,which was reflected in the accuracy of word expression.The increment of lexical chunks in the experiment group is much more obvious than that in the control group.The English phrases,clausal chunks and discourse organizers are crucial indicators of authentic English writing and language use.The experiment group in the posttest has produced more native English phrases compared to the pretest.The phrases have been classified into different groups according to their functions in expression.More clausal chunks and subcategories have appeared after adopting the Lexical Approach,indicating the increased awareness of using lexical chunks in composition.The appropriate utilization of discourse organizers has proved the enhanced ability in composing sentences.In the process of language transfer,the control group remains more negative transfer of native language,whereas the experiment group shows more accurate target language.For the limit of time,the acquired database in this study is not abundant enough.If it were a large-scale collection,it could narrow down the rate ofdata error to the minimum.For the further research on lexical chunks awareness,it may focus on different styles of writing,or even the influence of lexical chunks on oral English etc.