A Study On The Effect Of The Teaching Of Thematic Contextual Lexical Chunks On The English Writing Skills Of Senior High School Students

Writing,as one of the basic language skills,is an indispensable part of English teaching in high schools.It aims to train and test students’ comprehensive language ability.However,the status of writing has not been highlighted in current English teaching.Research shows that many problems exist in the senior high school students’ written expression,such as inadequate words,illogical expression,repetitious or monotonous words and so on.Therefore,helping students find more appropriate learning methods has become a key and difficult point in senior high schools English teaching.As a unit of language,lexical chunks are featured by both lexical and grammatical meaning.Meanwhile,serving as the smallest unit of language input and output,they have an extensive application prospects in English writing teaching.As a semi-finished product of language,lexical chunks can be stored in memory as a whole and extracted directly when used.It can effectively improve the fluency,authenticity and vividness of students’ writing.However,how to effectively master and flexibly use lexical chunks is still an urgent task for students in senior high schools.Based on context theory,psycholinguistic foundation and schema theory,the author combines the thematic contextual lexical chunks teaching with the writing teaching and tries to explore the effect of the teaching of thematic contextual lexical chunks on the English writing skills of senior high school students.The thesis explicitly answers the following three questions:(1)Can the teaching of thematic contextual lexical chunks improve students’ English writing performance?(2)Can the teaching of thematic contextual lexical chunks arouse students’ interest and confidence in English writing?(3)Can the teaching of thematic contextual lexical chunks have a positive impact on students’ language learning strategies?For the purpose of answering these three research questions,the author selected two parallel classes in the first grade of Gushan Campus of Fuzhou Gezhi Middle School toimplement a teaching experiment and it lasted 16 weeks.In the experimental class,the author combined the thematic contextual lexical chunks teaching with the writing teaching.The controlled class was adopted with conventional writing teaching.The writing scores of the two classes were collected before and after the experiment.And SPSS 13.0 was adopted for data analysis.The experimental results show that,firstly,the teaching of thematic contextual lexical chunks can enhance the writing skills of senior high school students.Through the experiment,the students in the experimental class can utilize various lexical chunks more accurately in their writing to make their articles more logical and full-fledged.Their writing scores are significantly higher than those in the controlled class.Secondly,the teaching of thematic contextual lexical chunks can effectively arouse students’ English writing interest and confidence.Thirdly,the teaching of thematic contextual lexical chunks is conducive to cultivating students’ language learning strategies which involve input,consolidation and output strategies,promoting students’ autonomous learning ability.