Experimental Research On The Effect Of Lexical Approach On "English Basic Writing" Competence

English Basic Writing is a new item in the NMET of Guangdong Province,which requires the examinees to finish the writing with five sentences according to therequest of the content. Undoubtedly, it puts higher demand on writing competence forsenior high school students. However, due to students’ limited vocabulary, negativetransfer of language and collocation errors, the present situation of senior high schoolstudents’writing is far from satisfactory.In the past few years, Chunking theory has provided a new perspective forEnglish writing teaching in senior high school. According to Michal Lewis，“Language consists of grammaticalized lexis, not lexicalized grammar.” Lexicalchunks are the minimum units of language input, memory, storage and output, whichpossess both lexical and grammatical character.Once learnt and stored in the learner’smind, they can be recalled and retrieved directly as a whole, which can improve theaccuracy and fluency in writing as well as reduce the pressure of timed writing. Theprevious findings indicate that lexical chunks have many functions in languageproduction, such as enhancing the fluency and accuracy of language output,organizing discourse and so on. Lexical chunks are the core of lexical approach.The experiment in this thesis carried out under the theoretical framework of thelexical approach, Input and Output Hypothesis, aims at testifying the researchhypotheses that applying lexical approach into English Basic Writing teaching insenior high school can improve student’s writing performance and writing strategy.The subjects in the study are80students from two natural classes in Grade2ofHaotou Middle School in Zhongzhan City. The results of the pretest indicate that thetwo classes’ English levels and writing competence are similar before the experimentand they are randomly arranged as the Control Group and the Experimental Group.The experiment lasted four months, in which lexical approach is applied in theexperimental group while conventional vocabulary and writing teaching is adopted in the control group. Besides tests, questionnaires are also used as instruments toinvestigate if there is any change in students’ English writing strategy in Englishwriting of the EG. The author analyzes the results of pretest and posttest by usingSPSS16.0software. According to the results, the subjects in the EG have madesignificant progress in composition scores after the instruction both in comparisonwith those in the CG and with themselves. According to the results of the twoquestionnaires, there is an obvious change in students’ English writing strategy. Aconclusion can be drawn from the research that applying lexical approach to “EnglishBasic writing” teaching can improve students’ writing performance as well as theirwriting strategy. Lexical approach provides a new perspective for teaching Englishwriting. It is hoped that in the future research, more researches on lexical approachcan be applied in other aspects of English teaching, such as speaking, reading.