A Study On English Writing Ability Of Non-English Major Based On The Lexical Approach

English writing, as one of the four basic language skills has always been a weakness to university students. Their ability of diction, however, is not going well. Normally, the optimization and richness of students’ language using directly influences their writing ability. Recently, studies concerning the effect of lexical approach on English writing have drawn more and more attention, most of which are qualitative researches that just focus on primary and secondary school students. For the above reasons, the present thesis, viewing from perspective of cognitive psychology, takes the college students as its research objects and aims to answer the following questions by methodologies of quantitative research and statistical analysis:(1) How does lexical approach influence students’ writing ability and fluency?(2) What is the influence of quantity of vocabulary and word frequency distribution based on lexical approach?(3) What is the effect lexical approach has on the number and nature of wrong use of words? For the sake of improving students’ writing abilities and accelerating the second language teaching, the present study will provide some feasible suggestions.With a three month experiment on sixty college students of non-English majors, adapting methodologies of quantitative research and using SPSS20.0 and Ant Word Profiler1.4.0w as research tools, I discovered that the English writing ability of students in the experimental class(including quantity of vocabulary, low-frequency words, writing scores, writing fluency) is higher than that of students in the control class. Lexical approach also affects the nature of the vocabulary in English writing to some extent. Thus lexical approach in writing for non-English majors’ is proved to be feasible and effective. For the time limitation and small scale of research objects, there exist some inevitable deficiencies in this research. This study, to a certain degree, provides an effective reference and basis for the future teaching of English writing for non-English majors.