An Empirical Research On Correlationbetween Lexical Chunk Approach And Vocational College Students’ English Writing Ability

Writing is an important part of the second language acquisition, and how to help vocational college students to improve their English writing ability is one of the research projects teachers of English urgently want to do. Based on Lewis’ theory of lexical chunk, the Lexical Chunk Approach is a relatively new teaching method compared with other teaching method in this field. Although some researches have been made by domestic teachers of English on the application of lexical chunk theory to English vocabulary teaching, the objects of study are mostly college English majors or non-English majors in key colleges or universities. Few students of non-English major in vocational colleges are taken as the research objects, even especially fewer are empirical studies of lexical chunk theory applied in vocational college English writing teaching for students of non-English major. Therefore, this experiment research applied the Lexical Chunk Approach in vocational college non-English majors’ routine English teaching process and tried to find out whether this method could promote the students’ English writing and whether there was a correlation between the students’ ability to use lexical chunk and their English writing competence.This instructional experiment took non-English majors in a vocational college, and it lasted for 16 weeks of teaching, including pre-testing, teaching experiment, and post testing. The experimental class and control class were taught by the same teacher with the same teaching materials, teaching content and teaching periods but different teaching methods. The data of this study was analyzed through SPSS 17.0 and came out as follows: 1. There exists a positive correlated linear relationship between the vocational college non-English majors’ English writing performance and their ability to use lexical chunk; 2. Since this method can greatly improve the ability of vocational college non-English majors’ English writing, the experimental hypothesis has been proved to be true that “Lexical Chunk Approach has a facilitation role in developing the writing ability of non-English majors in vocational colleges”.