An Empirical Study On The Application Of Lexical Chunks In Junior Middle School Students' English Writings

As one of the most important indicator of English learners' output competence,writing has always been the teaching focus in our country.There are many types of writing genres in English,which mainly can be divided into four categories,namely the narration,description,argumentation and exposition.Therefore developing students'writing ability of these different types is also the major focus of English teaching in junior middle schools.However,there still exist some problems in junior middle school English writing teaching.Teachers spend a lot of time in explaining grammatical rules and sentence structures,but there are no special courses for students to learn writing skills or strategies.Teachers usually require students to recite the model composition and then let them write an article through imitation.However,it is hard for students to put these stored vocabularies into use appropriately in their writings.What's more,influenced by the way of Chinese thinking,a large number of Chinglish expressions appear in students' compositions.Students' enthusiasm for English writing decreases greatly and most of students hold negative attitudes towards English writing.Lexical chunk is a kind of multi-word phenomenon between word and sentence,it combines both the advantage of grammar and syntax,so it is easier for students to master it.And relevant researches have proved that lexical chunks have positive effects on students' English learning.However,there are still relatively few researches aiming at the effects of lexical chunks on junior middle school students' English writings,so the author introduces lexical chunks into junior middle school English classroom teaching and tries to verify the influences of lexical chunks on students' writings.There are mainly three research questions:(1)What's the relationship between the number of lexical chunks used in students' writings and their writing scores?(2)What is the influence of different types of lexical chunks on students' English writings?(3)What are the changes of students' attitudes towards English writing after the experiment?In order to find out the answers to these three research questions,students in Class 12,Grade 8 from Shenzhen Gongming Middle School is chosen to be the experimental group and Class 11 is to be the control group.This research lasts for about 18 weeks,during which lexical chunks are applied to English classroom teaching in the experimental group,while the traditional method is applied to the control group.After finishing this experiment,students' writing scores and the number of lexical chunks used in their writings are all collected by the author,and then these data are analyzed by the SPSS 19.0.According to the statistic results,it can be found that lexical chunks have positive effects on students' writing ability.The experimental students' writings scores are greatly improved and their ability of using lexical chunks is strengthened.Moreover,students' writing scores are in positive correlation with the number of lexical chunks used in their writings.By comparing the influence of different lexical chunks,it can be concluded that different lexical chunks have different effects on students' writing scores,and among them,the phrasal constrains and sentence builders are most predictive,and the institutionalized expressions are least.In addition,by analyzing the two questionnaires,it is apparent that students' enthusiasm has been greatly stimulated and their attitudes towards English writing have been greatly changed after the experiment.Now they have much confidence in improving themselves.All in all,introducing lexical chunks into junior middle school English teaching is an effective and valid way,which can greatly improve students' writing ability.