Application Of The Lexical Chunk Approach To The Junior Middle School English Writing Teaching

Writing ability is one of the most complex skills in language skills,so there are many problems in junior high school students' English writing,such as unidiomatic expression,inaccurate grammar and illogical layout,etc.In reaction to this situation,researchers have put forward some approaches to writing teaching,such as product approach,process approach,length approach,and genre approach.However,these approaches have their own defects,which seriously affect the students' interest in learning English and the comprehensive ability to use language.Scholars have found that the lexical chunks including idioms and so on have a significant impact on the application of various languages.Michael Lewis(1993)said that,language is a system of grammaticalized lexis rather than a system of lexicalized grammar.Lexis is the core of language learning and grammar,and grammatical structure should pertain to lexis.With the concept of grammatical vocabulary,Lewis and other linguists put forward a new teaching approach:lexical chunk approach.In the study of many scholars,the advantages of the lexical chunk approach in the teaching process have been demonstrated.It can be used to improve learners' learning ability to a great extent,so as to their language skills.However,this approach still has some shortcomings,and its practical value must be demonstrated through the teaching process.According to the problems encountered by junior middle school students in their English learning and the problems existing in the process of teachers' teaching,the author then fully considers the advantages of the lexical chunk approach,and attempts to apply this approach into junior middle school English writing teaching to test whether lexical chunk approach can help change junior middle school students' attitude towards English writing and improve their English writing performance.This study is based on the experimental method and the participants are 100 students of Grade 9 from No.5 Junior Middle School in Minqin,Gansu province.They are randomly divided into two groups:Experimental Group and Controlled Group.Before the experiment,the use of the principle of a single variable,there is no difference between the students of Experimental Group and Controlled Group in English grades,learning ability and other aspects.In the process of the experiment,students in Experimental Group are taught by lexical chunk approach;whereas in Controlled Group,the traditional teaching method was still implemented,and the lexical chunks are not emphasized too much when explaining the text and grammar.Then two questions of this study are answered by writing tests,questionnaires and interview.The data collected in this study include:two groups' English writing scores in the final exam before the experiment,two groups' English writing scores in the final exam after experiment,the data of two questionnaires before and after the experiment,and the interview data of the Experimental Group.After the experiment,SPSS20.0 is used to analyze the data.The results show that the writing performance of the Experimental group is significantly higher than that of the Controlled group,and the attitude of the Experimental Group to English writing has a positive change.According to the statistical data analysis,the author draws the conclusions:(1)Lexical chunk approach helps change the junior middle school students' attitude towards English Writing;(2)Lexical chunk approach is helpful to improve the proficiency of junior middle school students' English Writing.At the end of this paper,the author puts forward the limitations of this study and the implications for future research.