An Empirical Study On Application Of Lexical Chunks To English Writing In Junior High School

Writing,as one of the four basic skills in English learning,is an indispensable part in the process of English teaching,and it can best reflect the students'comprehensive language competence.However,in practical English teaching,writing is recognized as the most difficult and always neglected by most teachers.And teachers feel hard to find effective and feasible ways to guide the students to write.Therefore,students' writing ability is obviously deficient and needs to be improved.Nowadays,the application of Lexical Chunks Theory to language teaching has attracted much attention of language researchers and teachers in China.Lexical chunks,as fixed or semi-fixed phrases,sentence structures,collocations,expressions,etc,combine the features of lexis,grammar and context.So they can be input,memorized,stored as a whole unit and they can also be extracted as a whole when being used.Therefore,applying lexical chunks to English writing teaching can help students to extract accurate and useful vocabulary quickly,increase the efficiency of language output,change the students' bad habit of Chinese-English translation in writing,so as to improve their accuracy,fluency and idiomaticity.The present study applies lexical chunks to English writing teaching in junior high school and tries to answer the following three questions:1.What are the students'difficulties in using lexical chunks in English writing?2.How can the lexical chunks improve students' writing ability in the aspects of accuracy,fluency and complexity?3.What is the effect of lexical chunks on students' writing scores and their interest and confidence in writing?Based on both quantitative and qualitative research methods,the experimental study employs questionnaires,tests(pre-test and post-test)and interviews.The author carries out a controlled experiment in a certain Junior High School in Hangzhou for almost four months.The participants are from two parallel classes of Grade Nine,with each consisting of 35 students.In the experimental class,Lexical Chunks Approach through reading and writing is adopted,while conventional teaching methods are used in the controlled class.To be specific,Lexical Chunks Approach is implemented through three stages:the input stage of lexical chunks through reading,the output stage of lexical chunks through writing and the consolidation stage of lexical chunks through evaluation and modification.The author also applies SPSS 16.0 to analyze the collected data.The major findings are as follows:(1)Before the experiment,most students are lack of lexical chunks awareness and they know little about the features and functions of lexical chunks and the strategies of using them.(2)After applying lexical chunks to English writing teaching,the students' lexical chunks awareness has been enhanced and their writing ability has improved significantly.The specific impacts are manifested in the following ares:the accuracy of the words,the fluency of the writing and the diversity of the expressions.(3)Lexical chunks not only have a great effect on the students'writing performance but also stimulate their interest and cultivate their self-confidence in writing.Meanwhile,their automatic learning ability has improved greatly.