An Empirical Study Of The Impact Of Lexical Chunk Schema On Junior Middle School Students' Writing Proficiency

As one of the four basic skills in language learning,writing is deemed as the synthetic reflection of students5 language proficiency.Nowadays,the writing part of the senior high school entrance examination is becoming more and more difficult.As a result,English writing has become a difficult and challenging task to the students in junior middle school,especially to those who are not equipped with enough basic language knowledge.Most of the students lack enough vocabulary to express their thoughts and feelings freely while writing.They are accustomed to organizing their ideas in Chinese at first and then translate them into English.Therefore,the writing proficiency of students in junior middle school is universally low.Integrating the characteristics of vocabulary with those of grammar,lexical chunk is the smallest unit of language to be input,memorized,and output.Lexical chunks are fixed in form relatively.Therefore,it is easy for students to remember and retrieve lexical chunks,which can effectively reduce the burden on their memory.Schema is the information network that is constructed according to the logical connections between different things in the process of acquiring new information.Lexical chunks put emphasis on the word collocation while schema concentrates on the logical connections between them.They are closely connected with each other although there exist some differences between them.A number of researches have been conducted by applying lexical chunks or schema into writing separately.However,few of them integrate the two aspects together.Therefore,in this study,the author intends to combine lexical chunks with schema theory and apply lexical chunk schema to English writing teaching in junior middle school so as to answer the following three questions:(1)What are the impacts of lexical chunk schema on students' ability to use lexical chunks in English writing?(2)What are the impacts of lexical chunk schema on students' English writing fluency and accuracy?(3)What are the impacts of lexical chunk schema on students' interests and confidence in English writing?The participants of this study are two parallel classes from Loujiang junior middle school in Kunshan.Lasting for two months,the instruction of lexical chunk schema includes five basic teaching steps,namely,the introduction of lexical chunk schema,the identification of lexical chunk schema,the construction of lexical chunk schema,the consolidation of lexical chunk schema as well as the application of lexical chunk schema.English writing tests are conducted in both the experimental group and the control group before and after the experiment.What's more,questionnaire survey and interview are conducted in the experimental group.By analyzing the data and information collected from the empirical study,the following conclusions are reached:(1)The instruction of lexical chunk schema can effectively enhance students' ability to use lexical chunks in English writing.On the one hand,the number of lexical chunks used in students' compositions increase.On the other hand,their strategies of using lexical chunks,including the strategy of lexical chunks input,the strategy of lexical chunks consolidation as well as the strategy of lexical chunks output,are improved after the experiment.(2)The instruction of lexical chunk schema can effectively improve students' writing proficiency.Not only their writing scores increase,but also the fluency and accuracy of English writing are improved.(3)The instruction of lexical chunk schema can help students build up confidence in English writing.They are not afraid of English writing any longer.Instead,they show great interest in it.To conclude,this study successfully verifies the effectiveness of lexical chunk schema instruction in improving junior middle school students' writing proficiency.On the one hand,it is the complement of lexical chunks and schema theory.On the other hand,it provides a brand new way of teaching English writing in junior middle school.