An Empirical Study On The Effectiveness Of The Lexical Approach To Improving Writing In Senior High School

Writing, as a productive skill, is an important and difficult part among the four basic language skills. Although both teachers and students try to improve writing, their efforts are far from satisfactory.Since a lexical chunk is a combination of grammatical structure and pragmatic function and has some advantages in using for communication, some researchers and teachers apply lexical chunks to English class. However, a few of them explore the correlation between lexical chunks and students’writing ability in senior high school. Therefore, the author attempts to apply the lexical chunk approach to Senior High English class to examine its effects in improving students’writing ability.The author did the research after the review of something about lexical chunks and lexical approaches, as well as the previous studies at home and abroad. The experiment was done in Senior Two in Xi Yang Middle School which is located in Shan Xi province. Class386which is the experimental class, was taught in the lexical approach; while class387which is the control class, was taught in traditional method. After two months’experiment and the analysis of data, the author found that the lexical approach which applied to English class can contribute to the increasing of students’writing abilities and students’awareness in using lexical chunks has been raised after learning lexical chunks.