An Empirical Study Of The Impact Of Lexical Approach Teaching On The English Learners' Production Level

The chunk nature of language suggested in lexical approach poses a new challenge to the traditional language teaching view that language is composed of individual words which are organized by grammatical rules. Instead, lexical approach stresses that"language consists of grammaticalized lexis, not lexicalized grammar", and this is the fundamental principle of the lexical approach which indicates that lexical chunks can offer far more language generative power than grammatical structures. The structural approach, frequently used in the earlier stages of the history of language teaching approaches, overstresses grammar and language usage and thus, leads to learners'poor competence in language use. In contrast, the communicative approach, a prevailing teaching approach in recent years, goes to another extreme to put too much emphasis on appropriate language use in context at the expense of the language accuracy. In this regard, the lexical approach seems to come as gap filler between the structural and communicative approach. While having a lot in common with the communicative approach as for the emphasis on language use, the lexical approach goes further to examine how lexical chunks play an important role in improving learners'production-language fluency and accuracy to be exact. The study described in the present thesis intends to implement the lexical approach in the practical English classroom to investigate whether the teaching in this approach has a positive effect on learners'production level-only writing included, however, due to the limits of the experimental conditions.The experiment involved 66 freshmen English majors coming from two naturally occurring classes in Three Gorges University, 33 students in each class. The two classes were randomly designated as one experimental group and one control group. The experiment exposed the control group to traditional teaching approach (teaching individual words) and the experimental group to the lexical approach (focusing on the strategies of identification, memorization and application for lexical chunk learning) respectively throughout the term. All the 66 participants were required to take 3 writing tests within the four months of the term according to the CET-4 writing criteria. The scores of the writing tests for each student and the number of lexical chunks correctly used in the compositions were entered into SPSS 13.0 for analysis. The results showed that both of the two groups made progress with AG making more progress than BG, and that the students from AG correctly used more lexical chunks in their compositions than the students from BG. Meanwhile, the diaries and interview suggested that the students thought highly of lexical approach because they have learned the ways of learning and using lexical chunks and of taking advantage of lexical chunks to improve their speaking or writing.