The Lexical Approach To The Business Correspondence Wirting Teaching In Vocational College

With an irresistible trend of globalization, business correspondence, as a means ofcommunication, plays an increasingly important role in business activities. Businesscorrespondence writing has gradually turned into a necessary occupational skill for businesspractitioners. However, the teaching effect of the current business correspondence courses hasnot been as good as expected.At present, the teaching of business correspondence mainly stays at sentence level,excessive emphasis is placed on grammar application competence and much work is done onsyntactic parsing. Nevertheless, business correspondence writing involves more thangrammatical rules and has its unique language characteristics. Therefore, a new teaching methodmust be explored to help students write an idiomatic and effective business correspondence.The development of cognitive linguistics and corpus linguistic find that naturally occurringlanguage is composed of fixed or semi-fixed prefabricated items—lexical chunks. Over the pastforty years, scholars at home and abroad have made remarkable achievements in the research oflexical chunks which reveal that native speakers retain a great deal of prefabricated formulaicitems which are available as the foundation for any linguistic novelty or creativity. Fluency isachieved largely by combing chunks stored in one’s mind. As an integration of form and function,lexical chunks present the inherent relationship between semantics, syntax and pragmatics.Acquiring lexical chunks can reduce the burden of language processing, speed up the languageacquisition, and facilitate the language output. In particular, lexical chunks help to improveaccuracy, fluency and other writing skills.The lexical approach, based on the theories of lexical chunks, offers a new way forbusiness correspondence writing teaching. This approach considers lexical chunks instead ofgrammar as the center of language learning by stating that “language consists of grammaticalizedlexis, not lexicalized grammar”(Lewis,1993). In addition, the lexical approach attachesimportance to communicative competence and considers that lexical chunks, when combined,produce continuous coherent text. Inspired by the research of the lexical approach, this studyaims to find out the effectiveness of applying the lexical approach into business correspondence writing teaching in Vocation College and attempts to explore the following questions:1. Whetherthe implementation of the lexical approach can contribute to improving vocational collegestudents’ business correspondence writing performance.2. Whether the implementation of thelexical approach can raise students’ awareness of lexical chunks in vocational college.3. Whichtype of lexical chunks is conducive to the improvement of business correspondence writingcompetency?This experiment involves60students from two classes of International Trade in Zibovocational institute. By random designation, the two classes are split into experimental group andcontrol group. The control group is taught by traditional method, the experimental group isinstructed with the lexical approach. After the experiment, quantitative and qualitativeapproaches are adopted to the results. The results from composition score indicate that inexperimental group the writing ability of business correspondence has been significantlyimproved after instructed by the lexical approach. The results from quantity of lexical chunksand questionnaire show that in experimental group, students’ mental lexicon has been enlargedafter the experiment and take initiative in storing lexical chunks. The analysis of correlationbetween classification of lexical chunks and the scores show that sentence builders, phrasalconstrains and poly words positively affected the writing performance. A follow-up interviewillustrates that the lexical approach leave a lasting positive effect on students self-confidence andlearning motivationBased on the analysis and discussion, major findings of the experiments are made asconclusion which support the viewpoint that teaching with the lexical approach can effectivelyimprove students writing competence of business correspondence and shift students from apassive bystander into an active participant in the process of learning. Besides, some pedagogicalimplications are recommended to better serve the need of vocationally college students.