An Experimental Study Of The Senior Middle School English Writing Model Based On The Lexical Approach

Writing is a difficult part in foreign language learning and it has attracted much attention in the field of SLA(Wang & Wang, 2004). Research on Senior Middle School English writing indicates that students have problems in the aspect of syntactic complexity, accuracy and fluency. Sentence structures used by students are almost simple sentence, with a lower rate of using complex sentences. A lot of grammar mistakes are often found in students’ compositions. What’s more, the contents of the writing are almost on the surface level without in-depth thought or innovation(Wu & Liu, 2013).The lexical chunk, with its nature of being a lexicon-grammatical composite, is highly correlated with students’ writing ability(Diao, 2004). However, Chinese English learners’ knowledge of lexical chunk is extremely scarce, and their use of lexical chunk is insufficient(Wang, 2007). Therefore, based on the Lexical Approach initiated by Michael Lewis, this thesis proposed a Lexical Approach-based writing model. It is by the application of the proposed model that the thesis tends to check its feasibility and effectiveness in improving students’ writing ability.Traditionally, the writing ability is checked and evaluated only by the composition scores. In this study, however, the author introduces another method, which is the measurement of syntactic complexity, accuracy and fluency. It is by the combining of composition scores with the measurement of these indexes that the author could get a more clear and scientific understanding of the students’ composition and writing ability.This study employs an experimental study which lasts a semester, involving 94 students from two parallel classes in Grade one in the same school. Both the two classes are taught by the author. Students are assigned arbitrarily into the control class and the experimental class, with the control class using the traditional teaching method and that of the experimental class the proposed teaching model which emphasizes the cultivation of awareness of lexical chunk, the accumulating and creatively using of lexical chunk.Data are collected from two compositions in both the pretest and posttest. All the compositions are scored and the software L2 SCA is used to calculate the syntactic complexity, accuracy and fluency. Then, the data are put into the SPSS for further analysis. Data results indicate that subjects in the EC achieved more progress than that of the CC both in the composition scores and the syntactic complexity, accuracy and fluency of their compositions. The mean length of the composition in the EC is much longer than that of the CC, and students in the EC are more likely to use complex sentences than their counterparts, which indicate diversity in sentence structures. In addition, the EFTT in the EC is higher than that of the CC, which means that the subjects in the EC are producing much more correct sentences than that of their counterparts in the CC.To sum up, it is feasible and effective to apply the proposed model to the Senior Middle School English teaching. The proposed Lexical Approach-based writing model is a good supplement to the present English teaching models, and it contributes theoretically and practically to the present English teaching.