Application Of The Lexical Approach To Teaching English Writing To Non-English Majors

English writing is an important measurement of college students' comprehensive English level and their practical ability of English application.It is also the necessary part of all kinds of English examinations.Therefore,it is essential to train students' English writing ability in order to attain high scores when they participate in various types of English tests.Although they have studied English for many years,it's still a great difficulty to write well for most non-English major undergraduates.There are various factors leading to that result,but the major reasons may be they either lack enough vocabulary storage,or they cannot produce the compositions with authentic sentences and well-organized structures,nor do they have confidence in English writing.As the lexical chunks contribute to the fluency,authenticity,and accuracy of the English delivery,and to a large extent,they reduce the burden of language output and shorten the time processing the target language,therefore,many linguists and teachers are interested in researching and applying it in teaching.During language teaching,under the guidance of the Lexical Approach,which is put forward by Lewis,students' writing ability will be greatly improved and strengthened in fluency,accuracy and communicativeness.In order to check the effectiveness of the application of the Lexical Approach on the non-English majors' writing ability in college,the author carries out a fifteen-week experiment,in which two classes of students use English textbooks of New Horizon College English Book 2(Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press).The control class is used the traditional teaching method to carry on the teaching,while the experiment class is applied the Lexical Approach to conduct the teaching.She wants to explore whether it can encourage the students' writing performance and improve their writing level.The research questions are:(1)Can the Lexical Approach increase the number of the lexical chunks in English writing?(2)Can the Lexical Approach effectively improve the students' English writing scores?(3)Can the Lexical Approach strengthen the students' confidence in English writing?Two types of research instruments,including two writing tests(pre-test composition,post-test composition),and questionnaires(before and after the research)are adopted in this study in order to make the research reliable and effective.Meanwhile,the software SPSS 20.0 and Microsoft Excel 2013 are employed to deal with the data analysis,so as to obtain the major findings of the study.From the analysis and the results of the experiment,we can doubtlessly conclude that the Lexical Approach in English writing teaching is effective and useful to improve the college students' English writing competence.Through carrying out this teaching theory,the EC students have developed the habit of making use of the lexical chunks in compositions writing.As a result,their compositions are more accurate,cohesive,coherent,native and authentic.The EC students mostly have achieved significant advancement in both the number of lexical chunks and scores of the English writing.The research also certifies that there is a positive relation between the number of lexical chunks used in the writing and the quality of the composition.Also,their interest and confidence in writing enhance outstandingly after acquainting a large quantity of lexical chunks.Therefore,applying the Lexical Approach in English writing is worth proposing and spreading.