A Study On The Influence Of Schema-based Lexical Chunk Teaching On The English Writing Ability Of High School Students

With the comprehensive reform of the new English curriculum in senior high school,it is an important concept to carry out the comprehensive English writing teaching in class.In the current English teaching in China,English writing,as an output skill in second language acquisition,has always been the key and difficult point of English teaching in middle and high schools.However,in the actual English writing teaching process,teachers have not actively discussed how to emphasize the cultivation of thinking ability in the use of English language in a correct way,and they lack of appropriate writing teaching strategies and scientific,systematic and correct guidance methods.Some Chinese linguists introduced the concept of “lexical chunks” into China by referring to the chunk theory of Michael Lewis,Nattinger and other scholars.They try to explore how to use chunk theory to help Chinese students extract chunks as quickly and appropriately as they would in their mother tongue,but there is no in-depth discussion on how to memorize these chunks systematically.Schema is the storage way of knowledge acquired in the past in the brain,and it is the response or active organization of the human brain to the past experience.Schema theory is also frequently used in writing teaching.Schema theory and lexical chunks play an important role in the selection,processing and memory of information in English learning.Therefore,schema-based lexical chunk teaching is a combination of syntax,semantics and language background,which can not only improve the effectiveness of information processing,but also contribute to the accuracy and fluency of language output and expression.Based on these,the author tries to apply schema theory and lexical chunks to English writing in senior high school students from a cognitive perspective with the method of experiment,questionnaire and interview so that we can explore its role in the development of English writing ability,analyze and summarize its enlightenment to English writing teaching,and hope to help English teaching in middle schools.In this study,the author proposes three research questions:(1)What is the senior high school students' awareness and use of lexical chunks in English writing?(2)Can schema-based lexical chunk teaching activate both schema and lexical chunks and enable students to remember more lexical chunks effectively?(3)Whether language schema-based lexical chunk teaching can improve the English writing ability of senior high school students?In this study,the author conducted a four-month teaching experiment with two parallel classes of senior one in Jixi No.1 high school.Before the experiment,the author conducted a questionnaire survey on the experimental class and the control class.In the classroom teaching,the writing class of the experimental class is based on the English written expression teaching model of “four links and eight steps” by Bin Aihua(2018).According to the actual situation,the author made some modifications to form the schema-based lexical chunk teaching mode.The control class adopted the traditional teaching method.After the experiment,the author conducted a questionnaire survey in two classes again and interviewed teachers and students.Through the discussion and experiment of schema-based lexical teaching for a semester,combined with the quantitative and qualitative analysis of questionnaire,interview and data analysis,the author has the following findings:(1)High school students have less awareness of schema and lexical chunk and have insufficient cognition of them.(2)Schema based lexical chunks teaching can activate both schema and lexical chunks and increase the number of students' lexical chunks,which can improve high school students' writing ability.(3)Schema based lexical chunk teaching can improve students' interest and confidence effectively in English learning and writing.Therefore,the author believes that the application of schema based lexical chunk teaching is effective in writing teaching in high school.In the future,the author will improve this teaching model and hope it will be helpful to the English writing teaching.However,this study also has some limitations,such as short experimental period and small experimental samples.