A Study On Senior English Writing Teaching Based On Lexical Approach

In the teaching approach from the author’s experience, grammar and vocabulary are isolated but of vital importance. Grammar plays the core role as a frame and vocabulary makes up the language output following the grammatical rules. While, in recent years, many linguistic researchers have realized that it is phrasal units that really help learners, especially the students, express the ideas and feelings. Through analysis of data in computers, many researchers found that the fixed or semi-fixed units complete most natural utterances. These frequently-occurred multiword units are called lexical chunks.Lewis(1993) put forward lexical chunks in his book The Lexical Approach, of which the basic principle is that language is made up of grammaticalized lexis, not lexicalized grammar. Lexical chunk is composite of grammar, semantics and pragmatics, which has advantages over others in communication.However, it is shown that the traditional teaching approach plays a leading role in senior high schools. The students learn vocabulary by using word lists and rote learning and lack the interest of writing. When asked to write a composition, they make sentences word for word from Chinese to English, but not compose an article, so mistakes are common in their compositions. Based on the Lexical Approach of Lewis, this study intends to find out whether the implement of lexical chunks in English teaching in senior high school can help improve the learners’ English writing performance and develop their positive attitude towards English learning.During the experiment, in the teaching of the Control Group, the students mainly learn discrete words by rote learning and word lists. Meanwhile, the classroom activities made up of various activities and exercises related to lexical chunks is conducted in the Experimental Group. The result of the statistical analysis shows that the students in the Experimental Group have achieved significant progress in writing performance after the instruction of lexical chunks. Furthermore, the Lexical Approach can arouse the students’ interest in English learning. As a consequence, special attention should be given to lexical chunks by teachers to raise students’ chunk-awareness as well as develop their ability of accumulating and using lexical chunks, so as to improve their English writing proficiency.