The Application Of Lexical Approach To English Writing Teaching In Higher Vocational College

Widdowson (1989) warns us that two extremes often appear in foreign language teaching: excessive emphasis on either structural models of competence, or communicative models of appropriate use. Lexical approach breaks the concept held by traditional grammar-centered approach that lexis and grammar are separated, and inherits the advantage of communicative approach which emphasizes the ability of practical application. Lexical approach seems to solve the dilemma that avoids the pitfalls and offers a new way for language teaching.Lexical approach, based on the theory that"language consists of grammaticalised lexis instead of lexicalised grammar"(Lewis, 1993), lay great emphasis on lexical chunks. Lexical chunks are a composite of grammatical rules, semantic meaning and pragmatic contexts. As a large linguistic unit it appears in real language output at high frequency and is more fixed in structures. The application of lexical chunks can improve the efficiency of language processing and contribute to accuracy and fluency and enhance organization ability in English writing.Responding to the objective of cultivating practical talents in higher vocational education, the goal of English writing teaching is to cultivate practical talents by imparting knowledge and ability training. How to improve students'English writing competence and complete the transformation from knowledge to ability? It has become an urgent problem to be solved. The empirical study in this thesis tries to verify the feasibility of the application of lexical approach to English writing teaching in higher vocational college according to the results of the students'writing scores and interview. The author attempts to explore the following problems:1. Is there any significant improvement in the composition scores of students in EG compared with those in CG after the application of lexical approach? 2. Do the students in the EG use more lexical chunks in the compositions than those in the CG after the implementation of the experiment? 3. What is the relationship between the number of lexical chunks and the quality of their English writing?The experiment involves 60 freshmen coming from two regular classes in Zibo Vocational Institute taught by the author, 30 students in each class. The two classes are designated randomly as one experimental group (EG) and one control group (CG). The experimental group is given the instructions based on lexical chunks,? teaching practice is mainly composed of various activities and exercises related to lexical chunks aiming at helping the students establish lexical concept and making them use lexical chunks consciously. The control group is taught by the traditional teaching method, students mainly learn discrete words by means of bilingual word lists and rote learning. During the experiment, writing scores and the number of lexical chunks in both pretest and posttest were put into computer for analysis by SPSS 13.0, besides, an interview was carried out in EG after the posttest in order to know the students'attitude towards lexical approach. The results indicate that lexical approach improves the writing proficiency of the students in EG effectively. The students in EG used more lexical chunks than students in CG. Students'writing fluency, accuracy, idiomatic and text organization in EG are significantly better than that of CG. The analysis of interview shows that students hold positive attitude towards lexical approach. They think that learning lexical chunks can reinforce their self-confidence and autonomous learning abilities in English writing.This thesis consists of six chapters. Chapter one serves as an introduction, mainly including background, significance and structure of the research. Chapter two is literature review. It is the theoretical foundation of the research. In this part, the author mainly states the theory of lexical chunks and lexical approach, and researches of lexical approach at home and abroad. Then the author summarizes the previous writing teaching in higher vocational college. Chapter three?is devoted to methodology, in which the research design and detailed instruction on lexical approach are introduced. Chapter four is about the statistical description and analysis of research results, and then pedagogical implications are elaborated in chapter five. Chapter six comes to the conclusion, including major findings and limitations of this study. Besides, some suggestions for further studies are given as well.