The Application Of Lexical Chunk Approach In English Writing Teaching In Senior High School

Listening,speaking,reading and writing are the four major parts in English teaching.However,in many senior high schools,English teachers pay more attention to reading teaching and ignore writing teaching to some degree.As one typical means of language output,writing can reflect students' entire competence effectively,such as vocabulary,grammar and discourse organization.Furthermore,for most senior high school students,writing is the biggest obstacle of English learning.Many students' writing level cannot meet the demands of National English Curriculum Standard.Therefore,in order to enhance students' writing competence,it is necessary to find an effective English writing teaching method.In 1993,the concept “Lexical Chunk Approach” was first put forward by Lewis,which regards lexical chunks as the fundamental units of language teaching.In his view,most lexical chunks are generated according to the grammar rules,which can be stored and extracted as a whole unit in human brain.Besides,lexical chunks can not only speed up language processing,but also facilitate language production.Furthermore,lexical chunks can also improve the accuracy and fluency of language use effectively.Due to these characteristics of lexical chunks,more and more linguists and researchers are paying increasing attention to lexical chunks.However,review of the previous researches on Lexical Chunk Approach abroad and at home indicates that researchers pay more attention to applying Lexical Chunk Approach to college English writing teaching.There are few studies that apply Lexical Chunk Approach to senior high school English writing teaching.Moreover,in these studies,researchers mainly study the relation between lexical chunks and students' writing interest and competence and do not investigate the relation between students' writing grades and the different categories or quantity of lexical chunks.Therefore,in order to further investigate the relationship between lexical chunks and English writing teaching,the present study tries to apply Lexical Chunk Approach to English writing class in senior high schools.Three research questions are proposed to guide this study:(1)What are the distribution features of different lexical chunks in senior high school students' English compositions?(2)What is the relation between students' English writing grades and the number of lexical chunks?(3)How can Lexical Chunk Approach be applied effectively to English writing teaching in senior high schools?To address the above three research questions,the author conducts a teaching experiment in Qixian Xiwang Senior High School from September 1,2018 to January 10,2019.At the beginning of the experiment,a pre-test is carried out in six parallel classes from senior one.The result of the pre-test indicates that students in Class 1 and Class 2 are nearly at the same writing level.Therefore,the author chooses Class 1 and Class 2 as the research subjects and assigns Class 1 as the experimental class(EC),Class 2 as the control class(CC)randomly.The number of students of two classes is 130,and each class has 65 students.Then,in writing class,the author adopts the traditional writing teaching mode in CC and applies Lexical Chunk Approach in EC.At the end of the experiment,a post-test is conducted in EC and CC in order to verify the effectiveness of Lexical Chunk Approach.All the data of the post-test are collected and analyzed by SPSS 20.0.By a semester of teaching experiment,the author finds:(1)On grounds of Lewis' s classification of lexical chunks,there are four types of lexical chunks,which are sentence frames and heads,words and poly-words,frequent collocations and institutionalized utterances.By analyzing the data of pre-test,the author discovers that students prefer to apply sentence frames and heads,words and poly-words and frequent collocations in their English compositions.Compared with other three types,institutionalized utterances are not applied in students' compositions frequently.(2)The correlation between students' English writing grades and the number of lexical chunks is positive and significant.(3)Lexical Chunk Approach can be applied to senior high schools effectively by helping students accumulate more different types of lexical chunks and improving students' ability of applying lexical chunks.In conclusion,through the teaching experiment,the author discovers that Lexical Chunk Approach can enhance students' writing level effectively to some extent.Therefore,the author argues that teachers should attempt to apply Lexical Chunk Approach to senior high school English writing teaching so as to improve students' writing level.