An Empirical Study Of Grammar-aided Lexical Approach To The Teaching College English Writing

Writing is the most difficult of the four basic skills in foreign language acquisition, but the present situation of Chinese college students'writing is far from satisfactory. In China, much attention has been paid to English pedagogy in order to improve college students' English writing proficiency. In recent years, many applied linguists have emphasized the importance of the generative power of lexical chunks to second language learners. As a result, the effect of the lexical approach in language production, especially in writing production, has been drawn great attention. However, the lexical approach is not perfect, and it is still to be improved.As for the question--how can the lexical approach be improved, a way was proposed in this research:the grammar-aided lexical approach. A study was then conducted in an attempt to find out whether the grammar-aided lexical approach is more effective in teaching English writingto Chinese college students than the lexical approach.The experiment involved 60 first-year non-English majors coming from two natural classes of nursing department in Chengdu Medical College,30 students in each class. The two classes were randomly designated as experimental and control group respectively. The experiment exposed the experimental group to grammar-aided lexical approach, with grammar awareness-raising activities incorporated in writing class, and the control group to the lexical approach throughout the term. All the other conditions were equal between the two groups:the same textbook, teacher, and length of class time and etc. All the 60 participants were required to take 2 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 and the number of cases of grammaticality concerning the use of tense, subject-verb agreement and syntactic structures were written into computer. Then the statistic procedures of independent sample tests and SPSS 13.0 were employed to analyze the data. The results showed that the proposed grammar-aided approach indeed had a better effect on improving the Chinese college students'writing proficiency than the lexical approach.According to the research results, it is believed that the grammar-aided lexical approach can be applied in English writing class to help improve college students'writing proficiency, and the grammar awareness-raising activities should be incorporated into English writing class. As a college English teacher, the author just makes a helpful attempt for teaching English writing to Chinese college students, hoping that the study would have certain pedagogical implications for college English teachers in China.