An Empirical Study Of Corpus-Based Lexical Approach To Non-English Majors' Writing

This thesis is an empirical study on the application of teaching English lexical chunks at college. It has existed for a long period that input is emphasized, while output is neglected in college English teaching. So, how to improve the quality of EFL learners' language output effectively has been focused on by many Chinese linguists recently. In order to solve the problems encountered in teaching, the author has studied the theories of lexical chunks, and the related literature about the Lexical Approach. There is no denying that writing assumes an important role in English learning and teaching, but Chinese non-English majors' writing is far from satisfactory. According to some authoritative researches, the lack of an appropriate teaching approach is to be blame.The present approaches go to two extremes. The structural approach accounts for one aspect of competence by concentrating on analysis but does so at the expense of access, whereas the communicative approach concentrates on access to the relative neglect of analysis. Recently, many researchers divert their attention to the Lexical Approach which advocates that language is not lexicalized grammar but grammaticalized lexis, thus overlapping the traditional grammar/vocabulary dichotomy.However, most of the present researches still focus on theoretical discussion in China and the empirical studies on the Lexical Approach at present are conducted with English majors. Lexical chunks are a unity of forms, meanings and functions, and can reflect the relationship of the semantic meanings, grammar structures and pragmatic functions. By learning chunks, learners can improve their language competence in ease, fluency and appropriateness. So many researchers pay much attention to the chunks. There are mainly two types of studies in the field of chunks:theory-driven study and the corpus-driven study. Based on samples of the natural language using, the corpus-driven studies can enlarge the study field, which makes them have the superiority over the theory-driven studies. Lexical chunks play an important role in language leaning and the research on the chunks of the learners'should be more essential. However, the recent studies mainly focus on the theories and seldom make empirical researches on the learner's language, especially the study of the written language of the learners. Therefore, in this thesis, an empirical study is implemented with intention to explore the effects of the Lexical Approach on non-English majors'argumentative writing of CET-4. As the corpus provides English learners with plentiful data of lexical chunks, it is adopted in this research.The experiment involved 114 sophomores from two classes in Shandong Jianzhu University with 57 students in each class. The two classes were designated randomly as one experimental group and one control group.In this experiment, which lasted for one semester, the control group was taught in the traditional method while corpus-based lexical approach was applied to the experimental group. Before the experiment, a pretest was given to make sure the two groups were of the same writing proficiency. At the end of the semester, a posttest was conducted to examine the effects of the treatment. After the data of the compositions was collected, SPSS 17.0 was employed to analyze the scores of the students'writings and numbers of lexical chunks in them.The results show that the students from the experimental group made greater progress than those from the control group. Since the two groups went through the experiment under the same conditions except different teaching practice guided by different teaching approaches, the better performance of the experimental group could be attributed to the teaching approach. In other words, it can be concluded that corpus-based lexical approach can produce positive effects on non-English majors'writing.With corpus being introduced into the experiment, the subjects had to learn independently and cooperate with each other. The instructor's role changed from a director to an assistant. Students could develop more effective learning strategies. This thesis is a tentative exploration of the corpus-based teaching approach and its application in language teaching and learning for non-English major learners in applied linguistic research. It is proved that corpus is invaluable aids in the teaching and learning of non-English majors.In short, the corpus-based lexical approach is proved to be a more effective method than the traditional teaching method in improving students writing ability, raising their awareness of lexical chunks and stimulating students to learn voluntarily. It is worth giving much more attention in the further exploration, especially to English teaching and learning for students of non-English major, who, with proper instruction, can develop their awareness of lexical chunks, and enhance their competence of language application.