An Empirical Study On Application Of Lexical Chunk Theory To English Writing Teaching In Junior High School

Lewis(1993)thinks that the lexical approach is superior to some traditional teaching methods,for example,Grammar-Translation Method and Communicative Language Teaching.The fundamental tenet of the lexical approach is that language consists of grammaticalized lexis,not lexicalized grammar.Taking account of the requirements of New English Curriculum Standards(2011),existing problems and significance of English writing,the characteristics of lexical chunks and the advantages of applying lexical chunk theory,this thesis proposes the following two research hypotheses:1.The implementation of the lexical chunk theory has a great effect on the junior high school students' writing performance.The more lexical chunks they master,the better writing performance they will have.2.The application of lexical chunks contributes to the improvement of students' vocabulary learning strategies.The author tends to focus on whether the application of lexical chunk theory to English writing teaching can improve students' English writing competence through an empirical study in Fanchang No.4 Middle School in Wuhu city,Anhui province.This thesis aims to answer three research questions in order to testify the research hypotheses:1.What are the present situations of English writing learning and teaching in junior high schools?2.To what extent does the implementation of the lexical chunk theory improve the junior high school students' writing performance?3.What kinds of vocabulary learning strategies can the application of lexical chunks improve?In this thesis,the empirical study is conducted from September,2016 to January,2017.The participants are 92 Grade 7 students who come from Class Four and Class Ten in Fanchang No.4 Middle School.Class Four is randomly assigned as the Experimental Class(EC),and Class Ten is just the Controlled Class(CC).There are no differences in age,gender and English proficiency between these two parallel classes.What's more,both of them have the same teacher,textbook and English periods each week.Hence,the only distinction between them is that they are taught by different methods.Lexical chunk theory is merely used in EC.The author conducts the pretest in September and the posttest in January respectively.In addition,the questionnaire survey is only conducted in EC after the posttest which aims to explore students' attitude towards applying lexical chunk theory to English writing and its influences on their vocabulary learning strategies.With the help of SPSS 22.0,all data are collected and analyzed in detail.Major findings demonstrate that writing performances of CC and EC are almost the same at the beginning of the empirical study.However,EC has made greater progress in writing English compositions than CC by using lexical chunk theory.Based on the above findings,conclusions can be drawn that: the application of lexical chunk theory to English teaching improves junior high school students' English writing competence.Besides,this thesis offers pedagogical implications and suggestions for further studies on English writing teaching.