An Empirical Study Of The Task-driven Lexical Approach On English Writing Teaching In Senior High School

As one of the core element of English competence,English writing reflects learners’ language proficiency and language performance.However,English writing has always been a weak link in the process of English teaching in senior high school.Thus,how to improve learners’ writing competence is of great necessity.The traditional teaching method put much emphasis on the correction of the spelling and grammar.But the overemphasis of grammatical rules fails to help students to improve their writing competence.The Lexical Approach has prevailed in the field of second language learning in recent years.According to the statistics,about 58.6%of the first language spoken discourse and 52.3%of the written discourse consists of lexical chunks.Chunks refer to the small units that can be stored and retrieved holistically,which can decrease the workload of language processing.A large amount of research have consolidated the significance of lexical chunk in English writing instruction.By using lexical chunks,students can improve the accuracy of the use of language and their writing will be more natural and coherent.Therefore,the positive effects of lexical chunks in English writing teaching cannot be negligible.Thus,this thesis combines the task-based approach with the lexical approach to guide students’ English writing,taking tasks as the driving force and chunk learning as the learning contents.This study aims at investigating the positive effects of the task-driven lexical approach in English writing teaching in senior high school by means of experiment.Two research questions need to be answered:1.What effects does the task-driven lexical approach bring to students’ writing competence?2.Compared with the traditional teaching method,what benefits can students acquire from the task-driven lexical approach?The four-month experiment was conducted in Jing Kai Middle School in Xi’an Shaanxi province.The class 2 Grade one is the experimental class,and class 3 Grade one is the control class.Before the experiment,a pretest was conducted in order to verify that there was no significant difference between the two classes.The teaching materials are New Senior English for China Student’s book 1 and book 2.The experiment class adopted the task-driven lexical approach while the control class used the traditional method.The new teaching method contains three parts:pre-writing,while-writing and post-writing.In pre-writing,the teacher leads in the topic and arrange the writing task for students.Students get familiar with the topic by doing tasks(such as class survey,oral presentation etc).While doing tasks,students are guided to retrieve the lexical chunks and use them,thus to pave the way for writing.The while-writing can be divided into five parts,including preparation,first-draft,revision,second draft and teacher ’s comments.The whole writing process centers on the use,modification and expansion of lexical chunks.Teacher should cultivate students’ awareness of using chunks.In post-writing,students are encouraged to sort out the lexical chunks and take notes to consolidate the knowledge of lexical chunks.The post-test statistics indicate that there was significant difference between the two classes.The writing score in experimental class was higher than those in control class.In the pretest,there was no significant difference between the two classes in terms of the number of lexical chunks.In post-test,the average number of lexical chunks in experimental class were increased to four chunks per person.In terms of the accuracy of chunks,students in experimental class made less errors than the control class.As for the type of lexical chunks,students in two classes mainly adopted the phrasal constraints and simple sentence structures.They seldom used polywords and conventionalized expressions.After experiment,the experimental class used more polywords,sentence builders and conventionalized expressions in their writing than the control class.At the end of the experiment,the author interviewed some students from the experimental class.It indicates that this teaching method exerts positive effects on students’ writing achievements and helps students with their chunk learning.Meanwhile,the task-driven lexical approach arouses students’ awareness of using lexical chunks and strengthens their interests and confidence in learning English.