| Recently, researches of corpus linguistics revealed a pervasive occurrence of lexical chunks in natural language. Lexical chunks are multi-word, fixed or semi-fixed meaning units, which combine form and function in language input and output. Many researchers assert that these prefabricated chunks play an important role in language acquisition, and regard them as the basis of the creative rule-forming process (Nattinger & DeCarrico, 1992). Lexical chunks are ready-made language units and are easily retrieved when they are recalled. Therefore, their important position in language learning has been paid more and more attention.As for the language teaching approaches, the structural approach emphasizes grammar, regarding grammar as the basic frame, and the lexicon the fillers; on the contrary, communicative approach focuses on the actual use of language in certain social situation, emphasizing the communicative function of language and neglecting language analysis. In this thesis, the author advocates lexical approach, which was coined by Michael Lewis (1993). From a new perspective, lexical approach requires learners to center on lexical chunks for acquiring and producing language. It's based on the fundamental principle"language consists of grammaticalized lexis, not lexicalized grammar"(Lewis, 1993), which means language acquisition is mostly to acquire and produce patterns of language with lexical chunks as wholes in a certain context; and language production is not a process generated by regular rules but by some lexical chunks with certain peculiar form and function. Therefore, lexical approach which may be the middle ground between the structural approach and communicative approach must lead us to reconsider our traditional teaching approach.And for many years, English writing has been paid little attention in junior middle schools. Though many researchers have proposed several approaches, few are applicable to junior middle school students. The traditional method results in many students failing to produce a satisfying composition after learning years of English. Writing may be one of the most difficult skills to be improved, which directly reflects the writers'fundamental competence to utilize language. The main problem existing in students'writing is that they can not use words or phrases appropriately in a certain context.Considering the features of lexical chunks, the advantages of lexical approach, as well as the existing problems of EFL writing in junior middle schools, the author attempts to apply lexical approach to EFL teaching, aiming to improve the learners'writing performance. On the basis of the consideration given above, the author proposed the hypotheses: 1. The implimentation of the lexical approach can improve EFL learners'writing performance in junior middle schools. 2. The training in learning lexical chunks can improve students'learning strategies.In order to testify the hypotheses, an experiment was conducted from September 8th, 2008 to January 8th, 2009. The subjects were 78 junior-two students from two randomly occurring classes in Binhai Middle School of Jiaonan, with 39 students in each class. One was randomly appointed as the Experimental Group (EG), and the other the Control Group (CG). Before the experiment, there were nearly no differences between EG and CG in age, gender, as well as English-learning experience and proficiency. During the experimentation, the EG was taught with lexical approach, being exposed to various activities concerning lexical chunks. Meanwhile, traditional method was used for teaching CG.Pretest and posttest were conducted at the beginning and the end of the experiment separately. Additionally, a questionnaire survey for the EG was made after the posttest. Then SPSS 11.5 was employed to process the data collected. Results indicated that there was no significant difference between the two groups in the pretest. However, in the posttest, significant difference occurred. The students in the EG achieved greater progress than the students in the CG. As mentioned before, throughout the experiment the two groups were under almost the same conditions except the teaching approach. As a result, we can attribute the significant progress of the EG to the lexical approach.Therefore, we can draw a conclusion: implementing lexical approach can improve the EFL learners'writing performance in junior middle schools. Then pedagogic implications and suggestions for further research were also offered in this thesis. All of this is expected to provide a new perspective for EFL teaching, learning and research in junior middle schools.
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