Application Of Lexical Approach To The Teaching Of Business Letter Writing In Chinese Higher Vocational College

The role business letter writing plays in the language learning is getting more andmore important. In the surging development of economy, we have witnessed that thebusiness letter writing, as one of the basic skills of business English, develops itself as asocial activity.It reflects economic life as a special object, expresses the language as ameans, and promotes the development of economy as its objectives. Currently, businessletter writing has been gradually developed into a broader process of economic and tradedevelopments in the field and for relevant personnel who conduct business transactions,it’s certainly become a skill to be mastered if they want to achieve much in their profession.Undoubtedly all of these request an immediate reform in the language teaching. Aslanguage teachers,it’s our duty to consummate the teaching of the business letter writingboth in contents and in methods so as to set up a more complete teaching system whichaims to serve the society. This article author believes that setting up the system shouldinvolve the specialized characteristics of business English as a base and the businesspractice as a framework realizing the learning and teaching of language.As for the learning and teaching of language, many linguists and foreign languageteachers are becoming increasingly aware of the importance of lexical chunks in recentyears. A lot of studies have been made on the chunking theory. Lexical chunks are theready-made memorized combinations in the language. They are form/functioncomposites. Once acquired and stored in human brain, they are easily retrievable andaccessible. In addition, they are context-bound and occur quite frequently, which makesthem highly memorable for language learners.(Wray，2002).Lexical Approach (Lewis,1993), advocates “language is grammaticalised lexis, not lexicalized grammar” and“language consists not of traditional grammar and vocabulary but often of “mufti-wordprefabricated chunks” and focuses on developing learners’ proficiency with lexicalchunks, has been put forward and opens a new way to English teaching. But most of thepresent studies on lexical chunks still rest on the theoretical discussions. In China, thoughthere are a few empirical studies on Lexical Approach, they are conducted with generalEnglish learners. In this thesis, an empirical study is conducted aiming at investigating whether mastering lexical chunks improves business letter writing and Lexical Approach issuitable for the teaching of business letter writing in higher vocational school. It is alsohoped that the chunk-awareness raising activities and productivity training methods inteaching lexical chunks in the study can be enlightening in teaching business letter writing.The current study involves60business English majors from two natural classes inKunshang Campus of Jiangsu City Vocational College, being taught by the author. The twoclasses are designated as one Experimental Group and one Control Group. In the study,which spans one semester, the Control Group is taught with the traditional teaching method.In the meantime, Lexical Approach is applied to the Experimental Group. After theexperiment, the author adopts quantitative and qualitative approaches to analyze the results.The statistical results of composition score indicates that the implementation of the lexicalapproach can help to improve learners’ business letter writing performance in ChineseHigher Vocational College; The statistical results of the number of chunks used in students’compositions indicates that the implementation of the lexical approach has positive effectin the learner’s use of lexical chunks in business letter writing. Thus we can have theconclusion that there is high correlation between the acquisition of lexical chunks and thesubjects’ English writing ability. What’s more, the author conducts a research on thelearner’s idea about Lexical Approach by questionnaire and it is found that students arehighly motivated in business letter writing and get more confidence after they master theway of using lexical chunks.Based on the research findings and analysis, some pedagogical implications areprovided:1) Developing students’ awareness of lexical chunks in business English in the teachingprocess.2) Helping students develop good learning strategies.3) Organizing Discourse by Lexical Chunks consciously.