An Empirical Study On The Application Of Prefabricated Chunks And Mind Map In English Writing Of Senior High School

As an essential linguistic skill,English writing count a great deal in English teaching and studying.However,in the process of teaching,the common problems of students' writing are that students lack interest and motivation,and most of them cannot apply various and appropriate expression as well as correct connectors of sentence and paragraph.Meanwhile,confused thoughts and illogical discourse make writing structure ambiguous.Indeed,it is rather complicated for all the students of senior high school to write good compositions.So,to solve above problems,it is necessary for students to be taught the prefabricated chunks and mind map.Prefabricated chunks are language units which can be kept in the mind and directly extracted and used in communication.Put differently,if students keep a large number of prefabricated chunks in their mind,they do not have to waste the time to translate and choose the suitable words to express their thoughts.And mind map can put the scattered points together through the deep processing,thus to clear the ideas and establish a logical structure.Therefore,the author used prefabricated chunks and mind map in the process of English writing teaching and went on the relevant empirical research.The whole research lasts for one term and this paper aims to answer the following three research questions:(1)Whether the prefabricated chunks and mind map can stir up students'interests in English writing?(2)Whether the prefabricated chunks and mind map can effectively improve students' writing ability?(3)How to help learners improve their writing ability with the help of prefabricated chunks and mind map?The subjects involved in this experimental study were 90 students of Grade Two from two parallel classes in Helan Huiming Senior High School.Both the two classes had the same number of students and were at the same level of English proficiency.One of the classes was the experimental class and the other was the controlled class.During the experiment,the experimental class was taught prefabricated chunks and mind map,while the controlled class applied traditional English writing teaching method.The author collected and analyzed data of questionnaire,writing tests before and after experiment in experimental class and controlled class and tested by SPSS.16.0.After the experiment,the author reached the conclusion that students' writing interests has been strengthened and ability has been improved which concrete in logical structure and fluent and accurate expression by drawing the mind map before writing and using many prefabricated chunks while writing.