An Empirical Study Of Lexical Approach To College English Writing

Much attention has been paid to English pedagogy in order to improve college students' English proficiency in China. While in the four basic skills in foreign language acquisition (listening, speaking, reading and writing), writing is the most difficult for college students. Though many approaches have been used to teach college English writing, it is still a headache for most students to write good compositions."It is acknowledged that language has three elements: phonetics, grammar and vocabulary" (Gui桂诗春, 2006). However, linguists have found that "language consists not of traditional grammar and vocabulary but often of "multi-word prefabricated chunks"(Lewis, 1993). Lexical chunks (there are more than forty different terms for this concept) are the ready-made memorized combinations in the language. They are form/function composites. Once acquired and stored in human brain, they are easily retrievable and accessible. In addition, they are context-bound and occur quite frequently, which makes them highly memorable for language learners. "Language production is not a syntactic rule-governed process but is instead the retrieval of larger phrasal units from memory"(Zimmerman, 1997). Language learners cannot achieve proficiency until they have had enough chunks in their mental lexis. Lexical Approach (Lewis, 1993), which advocates "language is grammaticalised lexis, not lexicalised grammar" and focuses on developing learners' proficiency with lexical chunks, has been put forward and opens a new way to teach college English writing.In recent years, linguists and foreign language teachers are becoming increasingly aware of the importance of lexical chunks in language learning and teaching. Many linguists, especially Becker, Pawley & Syder, Nattinger & DeCarrico, Willis and Lewis, have made a lot of studies on the chunking theory. But most of the present studies on lexical chunks still rest on the theoretical discussions. In China, though there are a few empirical studies on Lexical Approach, they are conducted with English majors. In this thesis, an empirical study is conducted aiming at investigating whether the learning of lexical chunks improves college English writing and at proving that lexical chunks are learnable and teachable. It is also hoped that the chunk-awareness raising activities and productivity training methods in teaching lexical chunks in the study can be helpful in teaching college English writing.The study in the thesis involves 85 sophomores coming from two natural classes in Hunan Institute of Science and Technology being taught by the author. The two classes are designated as one Experimental Group and one Control Group. In the study, which spans one semester, the Control Group is taught with the traditional teaching method. In the meantime, Lexical Approach is applied to the Experimental Group. In quantitative analysis, the Independent Samples Test of the compositions written by all the students of both Experimental Group and Control Group and of the lexical chunks used in their compositions suggests that Lexical Approach improves the writing proficiency of the students of EG effectively. Pearson correlation coefficient shows further that lexical chunks have positive correlation with students' composition scores. The qualitative analysis of the interview suggests that the students favor Lexical Approach as well. Findings of the study indicate that the chunk-awareness raising activities and productivity training methods used in the implementation of Lexical Approach are feasible and effective. The use of lexical chunks contributes to fluency and accuracy in students' writing.