The Effects Of Lexical Approach On Non-english Major Students’ English Writing

In recent years, the role of lexical chunks in language acquisition is widely concerned. Thus, lexical approach is recognized and applied to English teaching. Various studies indicate that lexical approach is to some degree an effective method to promote students? writing, listening and oral proficiency. However, the application to non-English major students? writing is rarely touched. Therefore, the present thesis, taking non-English major students as subjects and applying lexical approach to language teaching, aims to explore the relation between lexical approach and non-English major students? writing proficiency. The following research questions were addressed:1. Are there any differences in the number of lexical chunks in the compositions between the control group(CG) and the experimental group(EG)?2. Are there any differences in the use of lexical chunks between the high-scoring and low-scoring compositions of EG in the posttest?3. Can lexical approach effectively promote non-English major students? writing proficiency?In order to answer the three questions above, the author did a 16-week teaching experiment. 89 freshmen from two parallel intact non-English major classes in Xi?an University of Arts and Science participated in the experiment. Before the experiment, the pretest was held to make sure that there was no significant difference in writing proficiency between the two classes. Then, one of the classes was randomly chosen as EG and the other was regarded as CG. EG was instructed with lexical approach while CG was treated with traditional approach. After the experiment, the posttest was conducted in order to find out whether there was any change in students? writing proficiency. SPSS 17.0 was run to analyze the data.The results showed that: 1) after the experiment, the number of lexical chunks appearing in the compositions of EG was significantly higher than that in CG, which proved that lexical approach can effectively enlarge students? “bank” of lexical chunks; 2) after applying the lexical approach, the number of four types of lexical chunks used in the high-scoring posttest compositions of EG was much larger than that in the low-scoring ones; the students in both high-scoring and low scoring groups had a relatively better command of polywords and phrasal constraints compared with sentence builders and institutionalized expressions; the students in the high-scoring group used rich and various lexical chunks, whereas the lexical chunks used in the low-scoring group were limited, monotonous and repeated; 3) the writing scores of EG improved significantly after the experiment; there was positive correlation between the number of lexical chunks and the writing proficiency. Therefore, lexical approach can effectively improve students? writing proficiency.The results of the study can contribute to college English teaching and learners? self-study. Meanwhile, the limitations in the study are analyzed and suggestions for future study are provided.