The Effect Of The Lexical Approach On Non-English Majors’ Writing Proficiency

The lexical approach holds the view that language consists of grammaticalized chunks and these lexical chunks are the core of language learning and teaching. Researchers both at home and abroad have conducted studies on the lexical approach, but few empirical studies have been made on the effect that the lexical approach has on writing, especially through its application in English reading and writing course for non-English majors. Therefore, the present study aims to investigate the effect that the lexical approach has on non-English majors’writing proficiency through an experiment in which the lexical approach is applied in English reading and writing course.The experiment lasted for a whole semester and involved80sophomores, half of them coming from International Business class and half of them from Chemical Engineering class. The former class was randomly assigned as the experimental group (EG), for which the lexical approach was adopted, and the latter as the control group (CG), in which the traditional methods were applied. Both at the beginning and the end of the experiment, timed-writing tests were conducted in EG and CG. After each test, three teachers rated compositions according to the writing criteria of CET-4and the author counted the number of lexical chunks of each type used in writings. Both the composition scores and the number of lexical chunks were processed by SPSS16.0to answer three research questions:1) What difference(s) do students in EG show in the use of lexical chunks between the two tests?2) What are the correlations between students’use of lexical chunks in writings and their writing proficiency?3) What difference(s) do students of two groups show in writing proficiency after they have received different treatments?The results show:1) The students use larger number of lexical chunks in the post-test than in the pre-test and they make significant progress in the use of all types of lexical chunks.2) The use of lexical chunks in writings is positively correlated with studnets’ writing proficiency.3) After they have received different treatments, the students in both groups achieve improvements in writing proficiency. However, the students in EG achieve greater improvement in writing proficiency than the students in CG.The findings of this study could provide some experimental support for the theories of the lexical approach and shed some light on the application of the lexical approach in college English learning and teaching.