A Study On Applying The Lexical Approach To English Writing At Senior Middle Schools

English is one of the main subjects in senior middle schools. Writing, as one of the four basic skills, is treated as a weak aspect for students in senior middle schools. Students spend plenty of time in writing, but their writing proficiency is far from satisfactory. As a result, students lose heart and are unwilling to write even a short passage. They show great anxiety and pains in the process of writing. Meanwhile, they make a large number of mistakes. They are unable to express what they want to say or their expressions can’t conform to native speakers’. Teachers also show anxiety and pains in the process of teaching. In order to solve such problems, the thesis attempts to explore the effect of the lexical approach on English writing in senior middle schools.Lexical chunks play an important role in language acquisition. A lot of researchers focus on lexical chunks."Language is composed of grammaticalized lexis, not lexicalized grammar"(Lewis,1993). He stresses that language consists of ready-made units in the form of semi-fixed expressions and fixed expressions rather than individual words. They can be retrieved as wholes from the memory and are crucial to accurate, idiomatic and fluent language expressions.Although many linguists propose that lexical chunks make great contributions to language learning, few empirical ones have been carried out to find out the effect of applying lexical chunks, especially for English learners in senior middle schools in China. The thesis, on the basis of the lexical chunks approach proposed by Lewis and some other linguists, aims to explore the effectiveness of improving students’writing in Senior Middle schools by applying lexical chunks to students’English lessons and provide some practical suggestions for English writing teaching.The paper consists of five chapters. Chapter one is called introduction, which is made up of the research background of the thesis, the significance of the study and the outline of the thesis. Chapter two offers literature review that includes the definition and categories of chunks, related studies at home and abroad, theoretical basis and the lexical approach. Chapter three is concerned with the methodology of the study which gives a detailed account of how the study is designed and conducted. The experiment lasted almost four months from September,2012to January,2013. The subjects were 100students in Grade One from Tianjin senior middle school of Ningqiang, with50students in each class. One was randomly chosen as the experimental class and the other was treated as the control class. In the experiment, the students in the two classes used the same textbook and were under the instruction of the author. The author adopted the traditional teaching approach in the control class, while the author applied the lexical approach to English teaching in the experimental class. In the next chapter, the author analyzes the results of pre-test, post-test, two questionnaires and the interview. The thesis shows the statistical results and discussions. The result shows that there is no remarkable difference between the two classes in the pretest. After the experiment, there is remarkable difference between the two classes. The experimental class has got higher scores than the control class in the posttest. By analyzing the results, it is concluded that the lexical approach can improve students’ writing proficiency in senior middle schools. Some major findings of the thesis and pedagogic recommendations are shown in Chapter Five. Because of the limitations of the study, there still exist many problems, which call for researchers’attention for further study.