The Application Of Lexical Chunks To English Writing Teaching In Senior Middle School

In the four basic skills of English learning,writing is one of the most important benchmarks to measure the learning ability of English learners.As for second language learners,the major problems in English writing are how to use native language and accurate expressions to reduce the negative transfer of mother tongue and make the article more coherent and idiomatic.Probably the application of lexical chunks to the teaching of English writing could solve these problems in some way.In the 1970 s,based on the concept of lexical chunks,Lewis firstly put forward the idea that lexical chunks can be used as a kind of teaching theory.In recent years,due to the wide application of lexical chunks theory to teaching practice,it has attracted more and more attention and gradually become one of the major research objects of researchers.Based on the theories of information-processing and language acquisition as well as referring to the relevant research achievements at home and abroad,the author carries out a four-month experiment in Lushan No.1 Senior middle school,Pingdingshan,Henan province,which involves 100 students in two parallel classes of Grade 11.Class 27 is the experimental class,which accepts the guidance of lexical chunks theory in English writing practice,while class 28 serves as the control class,which accepts the traditional writing teaching approach.This thesis aims to solve two questions:1.What effects does lexical chunks theory have on senior middle school students' English writing ability?2.What is the impact of lexical chunks theory on senior middle school students' attitude towards English writing?There are four main instruments in this study used to collect data,including questionnaire,pre-test and post-test,observation and interview.The collected data were mainly analyzed by SPSS20.0.Before the experiment,the author uses a questionnaire to investigate the 100 students in the two classes,aiming to understand their attitudes towards writing,their strategies of using lexical chunks,and their interest in writing.After a four-month experiment,the author uses the same questionnaire to investigate the students in the two classes once again.The data of two questionnaires show that the students' attitude towards writing in the experimental class has changed as well as their ability in using lexical chunks and writing independently after receiving the writing training guided by the theory of lexical chunks for four months.The pre-test paper is the writing task in final examination paper in the second semester of Grade 10 in 2018.After the experiment,the author adopts the writing task in final examination paper in the first semester of Grade 11 in 2019.The author makes a statistical analysis of the students' composition scores and the number of lexical chunks used in the experimental class and the control class.The statistical data show that not only the average score but also the number of lexical chunks used in the experimental class are higher than those in the control class.At the same time,the comparison of the average scores and the comparison of the number of lexical chunks used in writing between the two classes show that the students in experimental class have made more progress than the students in the control class after four months' training.The experimental results show that: Firstly,employing the theory of lexical chunks to the teaching of writing can improve the English writing ability of high school students to some extent.Besides,the number of lexical chunks used by students in writing as well as their writing scores has also been greatly improved.They are significantly higher than those of students in the control class.Finally,using lexical chunks theory in the teaching of writing can also effectively improve students' writing interest and independent writing ability.