The Effect Of Lexical Approach On English Writing Achievement Of English Majors In Vocational College

Generally speaking, output is difficult for English learners. This research mainly discusses students'writing proficiency. According to Lewis'Lexical Approach theory, language is not comprised of lexicalized grammar, but consists of fixed or semi-fixed grammaticalised chunks. As the composites of form and function, these chunks are very conventional and frequently used in language. Compared with the traditional teaching approach and communicative approach, the lexical approach, which has attracted great attention, has many advantages. For example, lexical chunks can be stored as a whole in brain and retrieved easily when necessary. Therefore, mastering a large number of lexical chunks can raise learners'pragmatic awareness, enhance their information processing ability and facilitate their language production.This study tries to investigate if the application of Lexical Approach has a positive effect on English majors'writing achievement in vocational college. The participants in this study are 72 sophomores in two classes, majoring in business English in one of vocational colleges in Jiangxi Province. The two classes are designated as Control Group and Experimental Group. The traditional teaching approach is applied in Control Group and the Lexical Approach is used in Experimental Group. The experiment lasts about 4 months. The research questions are: 1. Is there any significant difference in the writing achievement between Experimental Group and Control Group after the experiment? 2. Are there any differences in using the four types of lexical chunks between the Experimental Group and Control Group? 3. What is the relationship between the four kinds of lexical chunks and writing achievement? In the experiment, two writing scores and number of lexical chunks are collected and analyzed by SPSS 17.0. The research results show that the sig. (2-tailed) value of the t-test on the writing scores of CG and EG is 0.032, which is less than 0.05, so there is significant difference on the writing scores between EG and CG. Moreover, the data also show that the students in EG used more lexical chunks than those of the CG. Finally, the results of Pearson Correlation also show that there is positive correlation between the four kinds of lexical chunks and the writing scores.Therefore, this study proves that Lexical Approach can improve students'writing proficiency and output ability. It is suggested that English teachers should pay greater attention to Lexical Approach and apply it effectively in the English class.