A Study Of The Effects Of Lexical Chunk Schema Writing Teaching On English Underachievers' Writing Fluency And Accuracy In Junior High Schools

Underachievers refer to students who have normal senses and intelligence but spend more time and energy in reaching the passing level of knowledge and skills compared with general students.Nowadays,the education of English is becoming more and more popular,but English underachievers still exist and occupy a large proportion in rural junior high schools.Writing teaching is an important part of English teaching for teachers,and the result of writing is a test for students' input validity.However,English writing is a big challenge for these underachievers.Lexical chunk schema writing teaching is a teaching method under the guidance of the lexical chunk theory and the schema theory.It combines the lexical chunk theory with the schema theory and has the advantages of both.Lexical chunks can help students reduce some grammatical errors of writing and make the discourse more fluent and coherent so as to improve the fluency and accuracy of writing.Schema can help students memorize lexical chunks,extract them more effectively,and project the structure of compositions more quickly.Moreover,a few lexical chunk schema writing teaching studies have shown that this teaching method can effectively promote English writing.This paper aims to explore the effects of lexical chunk schema writing teaching on the junior high school English underachievers' writing fluency and accuracy based on the relevant studies on underachievers and lexical chunk schema at home and abroad.Under the guidance of the lexical chunk theory,the schema theory and the input and output theory,this paper studies the following questions:1)What effects can the lexical chunk schema writing teaching have on junior high school English underachievers' writing fluency?2)What effects can the lexical chunk schema writing teaching have on junior high school English underachievers' writing accuracy?Seventy English underachievers in two classes in a rural junior high school in Henan Province participated in the teaching experiment.One class was the experimental group,and the other was the control group.There was a writing test before and after the experiment.In the teaching experiment,the participants got access to two different kinds of instructions:the lexical chunk schema instruction and the traditional instruction.After the experiment,we collected the data and analyzed them with the assistance of SPSS 22.0.Major findings include:1)The lexical chunk schema writing teaching can effectively promote the English underachievers' writing fluency in the junior high school.Before the experiment,the English underachievers' compositions both in the experimental group and the control group were far less than the requirement of the sum of words,and some underachievers even wrote nothing on the pages.After the experiment,the sum of words in the experimental group was improved.And the sum of words produced in the experimental group was significantly more than that in the control group.2)The lexical chunk schema writing teaching can effectively promote the English underachievers'writing accuracy in the junior high school.Before the experiment,English underachievers in the experimental group and the control group made a lot of errors in the composition,and presented low writing accuracy.However,after the experiment,the accuracy of the composition in the experimental group was significantly improved,although the sum of words did not all reach the requirement.They could write more accurate sentences.In addition,the ratio of the T-units without errors to the total T-units was significantly higher than that in the control group.Compared with previous studies,this paper creatively targets the English underachievers in the junior high school who are easily neglected.Although they have lower receptive competence than other students,the lexical chunk schema writing teaching method really functions on them.And it is also due to the particularity of these participants and the confined samples,the results have limitations.Future studies should overcome these limitations and expand the application field of the lexical chunk schema writing teaching.