| As one of the five major English language skills,writing is an expressive skill,and English writing ability is an important indicator for evaluating learners’ comprehensive language ability.The English Curriculum Standards for Compulsory Education(2022 edition)sets clear requirements for the level that junior middle school students need to achieve in English writing.But in fact,the English writing ability of junior middle school students is still at a low level due to the influence of various factors(insufficient vocabulary,lack of training,lack of strategies).Lexical chunks integrate grammar and meaning and have the characteristics of generative and stable,which provide a lot of space for learners to use words creatively.Since the basic concept of lexical chunks is consistent with writing,which is a comprehensive examination of students’ vocabulary,grammar,pragmatics,and learners’ writing ability can be visually tested through writing,the use of lexical chunks must be able to influence learners’ writing ability.This study attempts to introduce lexical chunk instruction into daily teaching and explores the effect of lexical chunk instruction on the English writing ability of junior middle school students through experiments,so as to provide a reference for the practice of writing teaching.Based on the classification of lexical chunks by Nattinger & Decarrico and Lewis,this study took students from two classes of eighth grade in a middle school in Taicang City,Jiangsu Province as the experimental subjects.The Taicang junior middle school English writing evaluation standard as the overall evaluation standard of students’ writing,and CAF(complexity,accuracy and fluency)as the calculation method,a 16-week experiment was conducted.This research intends to answer the following two questions:(1)What effect does the lexical chunk instruction have on the overall English writing ability of junior middle school students?(2)What impact does the lexical chunk instruction have on the complexity,accuracy and fluency of junior middle school students’ English writing?The experimental class mainly focuses on the teaching of lexical chunks,emphasizing the recognition and understanding of lexical chunks in reading in and out of class.The teacher designs diversified exercises related to lexical chunks,and the biweekly limited time composition training.At the same time,it helps guide students to creatively output lexical chunks,then make corrections and comments,and let students summarize the useful lexical chunks in the model composition by themselves.Finally,it carries out writing reflection to make students internalize the learned lexical chunks.The control class does not focus on lexical chunks instruction(using lexical usage explanation,grammatical analysis).The experimental results show that:(1)The lexical chunking instruction has a significant impact on the overall English writing ability of junior middle school students.The students in the experimental class have a significantly enhanced awareness of trying to use lexical chunks in their writing,and their overall writing ability has been greatly improved.(2)a.Lexical chunk instruction has a significant impact on junior middle school students’ English writing fluency,and there are significant differences in the mean length of T-unit and the mean length of clause.b.Lexical chunk instruction has a significant impact on the English writing accuracy of junior middle school students,and the ratio of error-free T-units per total T-units has a significant impact.c.Lexical chunk instruction has a significant impact on the syntactic complexity of English writing for junior middle school students.The clauses per T-unit and the dependent clauses per total clauses are significantly different.The above findings indicate that lexical chunking teaching can effectively improve the English writing ability of junior middle school students.This study draws the following inspirations.English teachers should help students accumulate a large number of lexical chunks,form compositions with rich language materials,and at the same time need to create suitable lexical chunk output opportunities for students in lexical chunks instruction and urge students to review the learned lexical chunks in time.This research will help foreign language teachers deeply understand the lexical chunk instruction,so as to provide new ideas and methods for front-line teachers to a certain extent,to improve students’ English writing ability. |
