The Effects Of Different Combined Modes Of Reading And Writing On Senior High School Students’ Acquisition Of Target English Lexical Chunks

Inspired by previous studies related to Focus on Form,Output Hypothesis and Noticing Hypothesis,this study is designed to examine the degree to which the different combined modes of reading and writing influence senior high school students’ acquisition of English lexical chunks.The study addresses two research questions:1)What are the immediate effects of four modes of intervention on senior high school students’ acquisition of target lexical chunks respectively?2)What are the retention effects of four modes of intervention on senior high school students’ acquisition of target lexical chunks respectively?The participants in the experiment were 124 students from four parallel intact classes in senior grade one of a high school in Nanjing,Jiangsu Province,and each class received one of the treatments of the combined modes of reading and writing:reading-to-write(R-W),reading-to-write with the reading enhanced by lexical chunks(ER-W),writing-to-read(W-R),and writing-to-read with the reading enhanced by lexical chunks(W-ER).This study consists of a pilot study and the main experimental study.The goal of the pilot study was to select the target lexical chunks and to optimize the experimental design.Before the experiment,a reading comprehension test was conducted as a pre-test to ensure that there was no significant difference among the four classes’ English level,and an immediate Lexical Chunks Knowledge test and a delayed one were carried out as post-tests to see if there was any significant difference in the students’ acquisition of the chosen target lexical chunks in different conditions of combined modes of reading and writing.The research data were calculated quantitatively by Excel 2019 and SPSS 22.0.The data analysis generated the following major findings:In terms of the immediate effects,the four combined modes of reading and writing produced a positive effect on the instant uptake of target lexical chunks in varying degree,but two groups(ER-W Group and W-ER Group)worked better than the other two,suggesting that the intervention of enhanced input through reading driven by Focus on Form may better facilitate the immediate acquisition of target linguistic forms in the activity of combined modes of reading and writing.W-ER Group outperformed the other three groups in the immediate acquisition of target lexical chunks,indicating that the reading-writing combination mode with the sequence of "writing first,reading with target lexical chunks enhanced followed" may best facilitate students’ acquisition of target English lexical chunksIn terms of the retention effects,all the four groups had a certain degree of memory retention of the target lexical chunks after one week,but the retention effects were all not that obvious.Thus,all of the experimental modes(R-W,ER-W,W-R,W-ER)failed to produce significant retention effects on the students’ acquisition of the target lexical chunksIt is therefore concluded that the combined modes of reading and writing of which the intervention is driven by Focus on Form may be more effective in students’ acquisition of target lexical chunks,particularly in the case of the sequence of "writing first,reading with target lexical chunks enhanced followed".The results may shed some light on the EFL teaching of reading and writing.The design of the combined modes of reading and writing driven by Focus on Form may be implemented in different manners,but should be encouraged with the repeated enhancement of target linguistic forms to promote students effective acquisition of them.