An Experimental Study On The Application Of Lexical Chunks Theory In Teaching Senior High School English Writing

Writing is one of the most important skills in senior high school EFL.To make an article coherent and authentic,and reduce the expression of Chinese English in EFL writing,vocabulary plays an important role in it.Lexical Chunks Theory is a teaching theory proposed by Lewis in 1970 s based on the concept of lexical chunks.In recent years,lexical chunks in language teaching have been paid more attention and gradually came into the vision of researchers.This study is based on the domestic and foreign researches on lexical chunks teaching and the theories of psychology,corpus linguistics and second language acquisition.The result of the research proves that lexical chunks can improve students' writing ability,interest in English writing and autonomous writing.In this thesis,the author conducts a one semester experiment in Changli Number Six Senior High School in Qinhuangdao.The subjects are 100 students of Grade 11.They are divided into the control class and the experimental class,with a total of 50 students in each group.Class Seven,as the experimental class,is trained with a method based on the theory of lexical Chunks.Class Eight,the control group,is taught by the traditional writing teaching mode.This study uses questionnaire,pre-test,post-test and interview as the main instruments tool to collect data.SPSS 21.0 is used to analyze the data.The questionnaire is used to investigate the attitude of the students in the experimental class from the perspective of writing,the strategies of using lexical chunks and the interest in writing.After a semester's experiment,the students in the experimental class are investigated again.The same questionnaire is used in these two surveys.The data of the questionnaire shows that the students in the experimental class have improved in the use of lexical chunks and their attitudes towards writing.Before the experiment,the author uses the writing task in the final examination paper of Grade 10 of senior high school in Qinhuangdao,Hebei in 2016.After the experiment,the author uses the writing task in the final examination paper of Qinhuangdao senior high school in Hebei Province in 2017.The author analyzes the numbers of using lexical Chunks and the scores of the students' composition in the experimental class and the control class.The result shows that the students in the experimental class are higher than those in the control class in using lexical chunks and the average scores of the compositions.Through the experimental study,the author obtains the following implications for the application of lexical chunks in English writing teaching in senior high school:Firstly,teachers should strengthen the training of students' lexical input and output strategies.Secondly,teachers should pay attention to increasing and enriching the productive activities of lexical chunks,and cultivating students' ability to generate lexical chunks.Thirdly,teachers should pay attention to cultivating students' autonomous learning ability and increasing their interest in learning.