| At present, Chinese non-English majors'writing is far from satisfactory. Among the various English teaching approaches, there are two extremes, namely structural approach and communicative approach. Although both of them are applied to the college English teaching, the scores of non-English majors' compositions are not significantly improved. In fact, college students are not short of grammatical knowledge and vocabulary, but whenever they want to write something, there always exit various kinds of errors. With lexical phrases as the core and based on the cognitive psychology, Lexical Approach that combines the linguistic knowledge with language application is a bridge between the two extremes. Being larger linguistic units which appear in the real situation at high frequency and in the form of fixed structures, the lexical phrases have many merits of being the ideal unit in college English writing teaching.Up till now, although many empirical researches focus on adopting the lexical phrases to the English writing teaching, the researches on the role of lexical phrases in non-English majors' argumentative writing have not been concerned. Besides, for many studies, the teaching strategies are either too general or difficult to meet the needs of non-English majors. So this paper attempts to fill this gap by exploring the effectiveness of the teaching of lexical phrases in non-English major students' argumentative writing, and analyze the frequency of each type of lexical phrases occurring in the samples. In the teaching practice, some specific teaching strategies are introduced through the author's own college English teaching experiences.In this experiment, the subjects involved 100 sophomores coming from two naturally occurring classes in Shandong University at Weihai, with 50 students in each class majoring in business management. Their average age is 20. The two classes were designated randomly as one experimental group (EG) and one control group (CG). According to the third term's exam, the average score of EG and CG were 70.53,70.15 respectively. In other words, the English proficiency of students from both EG and CG was nearly at the same level. Moreover, before the experiment, they had no chance to learn the lexical phrases systematically. During this experiment, the control group was not required to touch the idea of lexical phrases, whereas Lexical Approach was applied to the experimental group. The two groups were assigned three argumentative compositions according to the CET-4 writing requirements, in the beginning, middle, and at the end of the semester. Then all the composition marks as well as the number of lexical phrases were entered into the computer, and analyzed by SPSS 17.0.As a result, concerning the scores the students got from the third compositions, the students from both EG and CG scored higher than their first compositions. The students from EG made much more progress and used more lexical phrases in their compositions than the students from CG. Compared the EG with CG, it's obvious that for the CG, the lack of lexical phrases storage in their mind leads to the monotonousness and limitedness of their expressions. However, for the EG, with their rich storage of lexical phrases, they can choose and produce multiple forms of expressions freely. And their expressions are normally longer and of high quality with little grammatical or pragmatic errors. Compared with CG, among the four types of lexical phrases, sentence builders are the most frequently used one in EG.Thus, all the three hypotheses mentioned in this paper have been proved, namely the lexical phrases emphasized in the intensive reading class can help to improve the argumentative writing marks of non-English majors, and can cultivate an interest in students and lead them to learn English independently. According to Nattinger, J.,& DeCarrico, J's classification, sentence builders are liable to be learned and used in students' argumentative writing.
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