An Empirical Study Of The Lexical Approach To Decreasing Chinglish Expressions In English Writing Of Junior Middle School Students

As an effective method to test output of English learners, writing has attracted more and more attention from teachers and scholars. However, traditional teaching mode attaches great importance to grammar and vocabulary teaching but ignores the discourse and logical training of English writing, which results in numerous Chinglish expressions in students’ compositions. Secondly, it is understandable that students’ articles are filled with inauthentic sentences in that students are short of classical phrases and cohesive sentences. To deal with these problems, emphasis is placed on how to reduce Chinglish and ensure idiomaticness of JMS students’ language output in writing.Based on Lexical Approach from Michael Lewis, language is both a grammar-based, relatively open-up analytic system and a memory-based, relatively close-in formulaic system. This study tries to use Lexical Approach proposed by Lewis as a solution to reduce Chinglish in junior students’ English writing.Combining with the actual difficulties of middle school students’ writing, this thesis puts forward the following three research questions: 1. Can Lexical Approach raise students’ interests for English writing? 2.Compared with the traditional English writing teaching, can lexical approach significantly improve students’ English writing? 3. Compared with the traditional English writing teaching, can lexical approach significantly decrease students’ output of Chinglish?The thesis adopts the Empirical Approach, The experiment lasted 2 months, from September 2014 to the midst of November. The subjects in the study were 100 students in Grade Eight from two intact classes of Majiaji Middle School in Dingxi, Gansu Province. Each class had 50 students. During the experiment,the Control Class was taught in the traditional teaching method, students learned how to write by mainly memorizing individual word and grammar in the textbook. For the Experiment Class, various exercises and activities which were closely related to Lexical Approach formed the basis of classroom practice. Before and after the experiment, through the implementation of questionnaire, students’ learning interests and writing styles as well as writing strategies were investigated, students in EC got great improvement in their writing interests and styles, verifying the good effects of Lexical Approach. Unlike previous studies, in before and after data analyses, the researcher found that not just Chinglish, ordinary grammar errors and vocabulary mistakes were also reduced obviously in EC, these results didn’t get enough attention from researches before.In conclusion, this empirical study proves that the Lexical Approach is worth recommending in juniormiddle school English writing teaching. Meanwhile, these empirical studies are just based on a limited number of subjects and whether its findings can be generalized to other student populations remains to be seen.