Experimental Study Of The Effects Of Chunk-based English Teaching On Secondary Vocational School Students' English Writing Ability

English writing is a very important part of communicative competence,which is very hard for English learners to obtain in second language acquisition.Meantime,it is also one of the most difficult language skills for Chinese English learners to master.Linguistic researches have found that there are semi-fixed structures existed in vocabulary and syntax,with lexical and syntactic features.Linguistic researchers name these structures lexical chunks,which offer new views and perspectives for the English writing teaching.In these years,linguists did lots of researches on the effectiveness of lexical chunks approach in English writing teaching.However,the objects of their studies are mainly college students or high school students,and few studies involve secondary vocational students.As for the secondary vocational school students,there have been two problems to be solved.Their English vocabulary is few and their grammatical knowledge is limited,and they are more inclined to think in the way of Chinese thinking,so their ability of English writing is very weak.On the other hand,even if they have grasped a lot of words and grammar rules,they can't make English output effectively,because they have no interest in English writing and selfconfidence.To solve the above problems,the writer attempts to introduce chunkbased approach into the teaching of English writing in secondary vocational schools.First of all,the author presents how to put chunk-based method into the teaching of English writing.In addition,the further teaching experiment in practice proves the effectiveness of this method on students' writing to see if 1)the chunk-based English teaching can be more effective for the improvement of secondary vocation school students' English writing competence and 2)there is any correlation between the number of lexical chunks used in the compositions and the students' English writing competence.The experiment has been done for nearly four months,from September 2017 to December 2017 under the theoretical framework of the short-term memory capacity theory,the input and output hypothesis.The subjects in the study are 80 students from two natural classes in Grade 1 of Zhaoqing Medical college in Zhaoqing city.Before the experiment,a questionnaire was carried out in the tow classes.Pre-test and post test which is to test the English level and proficiency were conducted separately in two classes both at the beginning and at the end.To verify the above effectiveness,the author carried out a study in two classes.One was the experimental class(EC)under chunk-based English teaching,and the other class was the controlled class(CC)under traditional teaching.Moreover,a questionnaire was conducted before the experiment.Through the analysis of the results of the questionnaire,the author found out that it is important to carry out learning strategy training and use chunk-based approach in English teaching.By comparing the writing scores and the quantity of lexical chunks used in the students' compositions in EC and CC,the following conclusions are drawn 1)the quantity of lexical chunks in the students' writing has made a great increase significantly,and the accuracy,simplicity and overall writing ability are better than those of the CC,indicating that lexical chunk method has a positive effect on students' English writing;and 2)this method can effectively improve the students' ability of English writing and raise their interest in writing,reducing error when choosing the words and avoiding the negative transference of mother tongue.