A Study Of Lexical Approach To Improving High School Learners’ Writing Performance

Since Becker came up with Lexical Chunks and Lexical Approach last century,Lexical Chunks have been paid more and more attention to among linguists and recently many English teachers have put much emphasis on them. Although in present teaching classes in senior schools, many teachers still follow the traditional teaching approach, some teachers have been trying to adopt this new approach, exploring the effective classroom teaching strategies. The traditional teaching approach makes students spend much time memorizing words, but students feel helpless when they are required to use the words, which results in a decline of students’ learning interests and hurting their self-confidence as well. Lexical Chunks refer to these fixed or semi-fixed multi-words or sentence patterns in the form of phrases, collocations or sentence structures. Stored as a whole in human brains, these patterned structures are there for people to use. Thus the author believes that it is essential to make students have a good knowledge of lexical chunks and raise their awareness of lexical chunks. Besides,teachers should arrange different activities related to lexical chunks according to different teaching materials to promote the efficiency of language output.In the English College Entrance Examination, the writing section accounts for 20 percent of the full marks, but few students achieve ideal marks in writing. So, writing is a big problem confusing many English teachers. The author did a research on the relationship between the lexical approach and writing performance among senior one students, and the research achieved the desired result. The experiment was carried out,which involved two classes( class6 & class 7) from Wang Ganchang High School in Changshu.Class6 was designated as the experimental group, where the lexical approach was employed, while Class 7 was the control group where the traditional teaching was applied. After one semester, the author compares the writing performance of the formerexamination with that of the latter examination, and interviews the students about their feelings of lexical chunks learning, so as to probe into the effect of lexical approach on writing performance. The conclusions of the research are as follows:(1) The lexical teaching can promote the writing capability of senior one students and boy students benefit more than girl students.(2)The number of lexical chunks that students employed is not directly proportional to writing performance.(3) The lexical approach has little effect on the students whose original level of writing ability is high, while it has much effect on the students whose original level of writing ability is medium or low.