A Survey Of The Current Situation Of The Application Of The Lexical Approach To Senior High School English Writing Teaching

In1975, the concept of lexical chunk was firstly put forward by Becker. Lexical chunksare considered as the composites of syntax, semantics and context. If students could involvelexical chunks in English study as the input units, their memory burden would be decreasedand their studying efficiency would be increased as well. The lexical chunks can be stored inhuman’s memory system as a unified whole and retrieved as a whole directly when necessary.Through memorizing and mastering lexical chunks, students can overcome the negativetransfer from their native language, making their writing more accurate, logical andnative-like.The application of the lexical approach, which is based on the lexical theory, plays animportant part in English writing teaching in senior high schools. Nowadays, languageeducators have paid much attention to the application of the lexical approach to Englishwriting teaching. However, most researches focus on students instead of teachers, thuslacking the investigation of teachers’ awareness of lexical chunks as well as the situation ofthe application of lexical approach to English writing teaching.This paper intends to investigate whether senior high school English teachers possess anawareness of lexical chunks as well as the current situation of the application of the lexicalapproach. In accordance with the study purpose, three research questions are to be studied:(1)Do English teachers in senior high schools have strong awareness of lexical chunks?(2) Dothe current English classes reflect the lexical approach? If the current English classes doreflect the lexical approach, then how?(3) What is the influence of the lexical approach onstudents’ English writing?In order to study the first question, the author designs a questionnaire including20questions according to the principles of the lexical approach put forward by Lewis. As for thesecond question，classroom observation is conducted. The author has made a detailed recordof teachers’ teaching process and paid attention to marking the teaching of lexical chunks.Based on the classroom observation, two typical classes are selected for further study. Theauthor collects60pieces of writing from two different classes, namely Class A and Class B. The teacher of Class A has applied the lexical chunks to English teaching properly andattentively, while the teacher of Class B just explains the lexical chunks that occur in thetextbooks. Through analyzing the compositions of these two classes, the author tries to findout what the influence of the lexical approach is on students’ writing. Afterwards, all the dataof the study are collected and analyzed in detail. The main findings are as follows:(1) The majority of the English teachers in senior high schools have strong awareness oflexical chunks. Most of the teachers pay attention to cultivating students’ awareness of lexicalchunks. They guide students to recognize and collect lexical chunks both in the textbooks andin other materials.(2) Most of the English classes reflect the application of the lexical approach. Teachersask students to mark the phrases and expressions in the textbooks as well as in exercises.They will explain the meaning and usage of these lexical chunks in detail and prepare severaldrills for students to consolidate the usage of lexical chunks. Besides, most of the teacherswill have a dictation about the important lexical chunks. In addition, some teachers apply thelexical approach properly to writing teaching.(3) The lexical approach has great influence on students’ writing. After comparingcompositions of students from Class A and Class B, the author finds that those students whohave used a large number of lexical chunks tend to get higher scores. The application oflexical chunks helps to make students’ writing more fluent, logical, accurate and native-like.