A Study On Applying The Lexical Approach To English Letter Writing In Junior High School

Letter writing,as a common type of English writing,is used with high frequency both in study and daily life.Therefore,to cultivate students' writing ability of a specific type is the emphasis of English writing teaching in junior high school as well.However,the present situation of English writing teaching in junior high schools still has many problems.Teachers devote most of the limited class time to the explanation of grammatical rules and sentence structures.Students are usually required to recite the sample essays for imitation to prepare for the examinations.However,there is no specialized course offered for students to practise their letter writing skills.Besides,students have difficulty in using the vocabulary stored in their mind appropriately so that there are many Chinglish expressions in their compositions influenced by the negative transfer of mother tongue.Lexical chunks combine the advantages of grammar and syntax,which makes it easy for students to master.However,there are very few studies investigating the effects of the lexical approach on the English letter writing in junior high school from the empirical perspective,which needs further study.Based on Language Acquisition Theory and Information Processing Theory,the present study attempts to investigate the effects of the lexical approach on students' English letter writing scores and the relation between the number of lexical chunks and students' English letter writing proficiency.What's more,the influence of different types of lexical chunks on students' English letter writing scores is also explored.To answer the three questions,an 18-week teaching experiment is conducted in Shenzhen Shixia School.Ninety students from two parallel classes in Grade Seven are involved in the experiment.Before the experiment,a pre-test is taken to ensure that there is no significant difference in the writing proficiency of the two classes.Then during the experiment,Class 1 is selected as the controlled class which is instructed with the traditional approach,while Class 2 is the experimental class,applying the lexical approach.Students from the two classes are taught by the same teacher and have the same teaching materials.After the experiment,a post-test is given to find out whether there exist significant differences between the two classes.SPSS 19.0 is used to analyze the writing scores and the number of lexical chunks used in students,compositions.The statistical results show that the writing scores of both classes have improved,but the improvement made by the experimental class is more prominent than that of the controlled class,which manifests that the lexical approach has positive effects on students' writing scores.Besides,after the experiment,students in EC use more lexical chunks than those in CC,indicating that the lexical approach can enrich the amount of lexical chunks.Moreover,there is a positive correlation between the number of lexical chunks and students' writing proficiency.It can be observed that the phrasal constraints and sentence builders are most predictive and the institutionalized expressions are the least by analyzing the influence of different types of lexical chunks on students' writing scores.Thus,the lexical approach can effectively improve students' writing proficiency.To sum up,the application of the lexical approach to English letter writing teaching in junior high school is effective and feasible.However,due to the limited time,the study has some limitations and needs to be improved further.Suggestions for future studies are also provided.