An Empirical Study Of The Lexical Chunks’ Effect On Chinese College Students’ Writing

Writing, a form of output of English, occupies an important place in English teaching and learning. There is no denying that writing assumes an important role in English learning and teaching. But Chinese college students’ English writing performance has been far from satisfactory for decades although their overall English performance has got improved. Based on the major findings published in authoritative journals in the field of writing, the absence of an appropriate teaching approach should be blame. Therefore, how to teach the vocabulary efficiently and how to improve students’writing ability puzzle both students and teachers greatly.Michael Lewis’Lexical Approach has been hailed as a good solution to a series of problems in English language teaching because it can lighten the burden of language processing to make the language output more quickly, natively and accurately.To know more about the effect of the Lexical Approach on college students’writing performance, the author carried out an empirical study on two intact classes of freshmen from Nanjing University of Chinese Medicine and analyzed the writing samples by using SPSS.17.0, which based Lexical-Chunk theory on vocabulary acquisition and the existing problems in college students’writing.After the empirical study, the researcher finds the following findings:The EG get much higher mean score than the CG in the last composition, and the application of Lexical Approach can improve students’awareness of chunks and improve the accuracy and appropriateness. Meanwhile, with the accumulation of in-depth English knowledge, there is the upward trend of the use of chunks.Lexical chunks and writing are closely related. The number of correctly-used lexical chunks is significant to the scores, especially phrasal constraints and sentence builders, which means there is a positive correlation between the use of lexical chunks and college English writing, besides the contribution of the lexical approach to participants’ confidence in their English learning.The author of this thesis strongly recommends that college students acquire the knowledge of the chunks in the specific context, rather than isolation. And instead of requiring learners to memorize individual words, English teachers should also realize that the Lexical Approach, which is based on the teaching of lexical chunks, is a feasible and effective way to facilitate college students’writing proficiency and probably points out a new trend of development for College English teaching.