How The Lexical Approach Affects Chinese EFL Learners' Writing Development

To Chinese EFL learners, the aim of language teaching is to develop their comprehensive language abilities—the abilities of listening, speaking, reading, writing and interpreting. Therefore, learning to write is an indispensable part of language learning. Although much effort has been made in this aspect on the part of both teachers and learners, their writing ability is still far from satisfactory. After committing a great number of words and grammatical rules to memory and learning how to construct English compositions, learners still cannot write a good composition. They cannot use proper words or phrases in certain context appropriately. Why are there so many problems in EFL learners' English writing? One of the most important reasons is that there is no suitable teaching approach. Just as Widdowson (1989:131) indicates "The structural approach accounts for one aspect of competence by concentrating on analysis but does so at the expense of access, whereas the communicative approach concentrates on access to the relative neglect of analysis".With lexical chunks as the core and based on cognitive psychology, the lexical approach is a kind of compromise between structural approach and communicative approach. It involves a completely different concept of foreign language teaching and learning, and attaches great significance to "chunk" but not vocabulary, language sense but not grammar. By definition, a lexical chunk is a synthesis, which combines "form" and "function". Lexical chunks are the ready-made memorized combinations in the language. Once they are acquired and stored in the human brain, they are easily retrievable and accessible. Besides, they are context-bound and occur quite frequently, which makes them highly memorable for students.In this thesis, a study is undertaken to find out whether the lexical approach has a positive effect on Chinese EFL learners' writing development.Two randomly selected intact classes from Nantong University, 60 sophomores for each class, were involved in the experiment, with one being the experimental group (EG) and the other the control group (CG). Different teaching approaches were adopted in classroom instructions, the regular approach for the CG and the lexical-chunk approach for the EG. Various in-class and after-class teaching and learning activities concerning lexical chunks were carried out in the EG. At the beginning and the end of the experiment, the learners were required to write an essay on the same topic in limited time, and then the compositions were scored and the chunk numbers of the four types were counted. All the data were entered into the computer and analyzed by the SPSS 11.5. After the test, an interview was conducted to have some idea about learners' attitude towards the lexical approach.The data analysis has revealed that by adopting the lexical approach, the EFL learners' awareness of recognizing and using the lexical chunks are significantly improved through a wide range of in-class and after-class teaching and learning activities. Using lexical chunks in writing can help learners to improve their writing speed and fluency of expression and consistency of meaning. Employing some lexical chunks appropriately in compositions can make the language more accurate and idiomatic. If learners apply such lexical chunks as sentence builders appropriately in writing, the construction of their compositions will be explicit, and the content coherent, thus their discourse composing ability can be improved. Through the interview, we may conclude that lexical chunks can help EFL learners to express their ideas freely in writing, increase their confidence and make them study more actively, which contributes to inspiring students for further success in English learning.The results of the study show the lexical approach has some positive effects onChinese EFL learners' writing development.