An Empirical Study On The Effectiveness Of The Lexical Approach In Optimizing English Writing Strategies

In recent years, the teaching of English writing has gained its attention in foreign language teachers. The focus of foreign language learning and teaching has shifted from language input skills (including reading and listening) to language output skills (including speaking and writing). Although the development of students’writing competency is the most essential part in English teaching, English writing remains the biggest obstacle for English learning in China. Surprisingly, many of those low-proficiency students have mastered numerous grammar rules and vocabularies. This paradoxical phenomenon may result from much uncoupling between language input and output in language acquisition. Thus, how to guide students to output language effectively, and to convert the knowledge of language into language skills, emerges as an essential teaching task.With the rapid development of cognitive linguistics, applied linguistics, corpus linguistics and information science, those fixed or semi-fixed formulaic word bundles, or lexical chunks, have gotten broader concerns by linguists on their functions in second or foreign language acquisition. The lexical approach with its center on lexical chunks is getting its application in foreign language teaching and learning, which involves listening, speaking, reading and writing. The effectiveness of the lexical approach to facilitate those four basic language processes is theoretically or empirically analyzed and established from diverse perspectives. Writing, a specific type of language production, is essentially the piecing together of ready-made units appropriate for a particular situation. Therefore, those ready-made units should be taught and learnt in order to facilitate writing. Lexical chunks have been denoted as those ready-made units. Theoretically, lexical chunks are intensely taught and learned in the lexical approach, as this approach centers on developing learners’proficiency with lexis. Therefore, the lexical approach has been theoretically predicted to improve the idiomaticity, fluency and coherence of foreign language writing. Empirical studies have also established the effectiveness of the lexical approach to improve writing, especially in foreign or second language learners. However, the underlying mechanisms for this teaching approach to improve writing have remained unclear. English writing strategies are the most prominent impact factors intrinsic to language learners in English writing, and the teaching approaches can modify English writing strategies. Therefore, the present study has attempted to explore the underlying mechanisms responsible for the effectiveness of the lexical approach on improving writing from the perspective of English writing strategies.Participants in this experiment are98freshman non-English majors from two parallel classes taught by the author in Southwestern University of Finance and Economics (SWUFE). One class was randomly chosen as the experimental group, and the other as the control group. The implementation of the lexical approach includes the introduction to the basic knowledge of lexical chunks, the identification and accumulation of lexical chunks, and language productivity training methods. Before and after the experiment, writing tests and English Writing Strategy Questionnaires were given to the participants. Data were collected, processed and analyzed by the statistical software SPSS15.0. Specifically, within-group paired samples test and between-group independent samples test were employed. The counting and analysis of the number of lexical chunks in pre-and post-test writings aimed to check the successful implementation of the lexical approach. Data from the English Writing Strategy Questionnaires include the scores of the whole strategies, metacognitive strategies, cognitive strategies and social/affective strategies. Those data were further statistically analyzed to determine the relative effectiveness of the lexical approach, in comparison with the regular approach, to upgrade the whole or specific category of English writing strategies.In the present study, we have several major findings. Both the lexical approach and the regular approach have the ability to upgrade the whole English writing strategies. The lexical approach can impact all the three categories of English writing strategies, while the regular approach only functions in metacognitive and cognitive strategies. Hence the lexical approach is superior to the regular approach in strengthening English writing strategies. In the first place, the present study investigated the effectiveness of the lexical approach to upgrade English writing strategies in an attempt to find out the underlying mechanisms responsible for the effectiveness of the lexical approach to facilitate English writing from the perspective of English writing strategies. The results and conclusions would be helpful for the application of the lexical approach in English writing teaching in China.