A Research On The Application Of Lexical Approach To English Invitation Letter Writing In Senior High School

As one of the most important language skills in foreign language acquisition,writing has a direct effect on the development of other language skills, namelylistening，speaking and reading. According to the studies of many linguists, there arequite a few ifxed or semi-fixed language structures in the natural languages of humanbeings, which are called lexical chunks. Lexical chunks are the ready-madememorized units of language，which，once acquired and stored in the brain, can beretireved as a whole. Thus, lexical chunks play a vital role in first language andforeign language acquisition. Nowadays, many researchers began to conducttheoretical and empirical researches on the lexical approach applied to writing.However, very few studies are made on senior high school students who arerelatively poor at vocabulary and grammar. According to the auth’ors statistics，theinvitation letter writing has taken a large proportion in the college entrance examrecently. Therefore, the author attempts to apply the lexical approach to the teachingof invitation letter writing in senior high school，in order to explore whether theapplication of the lexical approach improves the students’ invitation writing, and thenthe overall level of their English writing. The research questions are: Does the lexicalapproach applied to writing contribute to improvement of writing of senior highschool students? How much does the students’ writing improve atfer they applied thelexical approach?The empirical study involved88students from Grade Two in one senior highschool. During the experiment, the lexical approach was employed to the teaching ofwriting at the English class, and the students were asked to take pre-test，post-test1 and post-test2. Then the compositions written in the tests were collected. The authorcounted the numbers of lexical chunks the students used in their compositions andthe using frequency of the lexical chunks, analyzed the statistics and madeconclusions.The experiment results show that the application of lexical approach to theEnglish writing, to some degree, can improve the senior sch’ool students writing skill;and the students’ English writing becomes more accurate and fluent. And also thestudents can use some lexical chunks more flexibly in their English writing.This thesis mainly consists of ifve chapters. Chapter One makes a briefintroduction to the thesis. Chapter Two mainly reviews the lexical chunks, the natureof EFL writing and the advantages of lexical chunks. Chapter Three describes thetheoretical basis related to the research. Chapter Four concerns the research designand the results, the data collected and the data analysis. Chapter Five comes to theconclusion.