A Contrastive Study On The Effects Of Genre Approach And Process Approach On Lexical Chunks In HVC Students' English Writing

Writing has been one of the heated topics among college English teaching,especially for the teaching in the Higher Vocational College(HVC for abbreviation).According to Basic Requirements for Vocational College English,the writing tasks in HVC English,center on the practical writing with clear communicative purposes,which are greatly influenced by the use of lexical chunks.Scholars at home and abroad have conducted researches on the effect of genre and process approaches on English proficiency,while a few have explored the effects on lexical chunks in writing.The present study aims to compare the effects of the genre approach and process approach on the distribution of the lexical chunks in English practical writing in Higher Vocational College.In this study,a contrastive study was conducted.Sixty non-English majored freshmen out of two natural classes from Xi'an Aeronautical University were selected to explore their effects of genre approach and process approach on the lexical chunks distribution in HVC English writing.The two classes were distributed randomly into the control class and experimental class.The control class adopted the traditional genre approach.The experimental class adopted process approach.Both of the two classes received a twelve-week treatment.All of the sixty subjects were required to take a practical English writing from English NCEE and Practical English Test for Colleges before and after the treatment respectively.The numbers of each category of lexical chunks in the two tests were identified and counted by AntConc 3.2.0.All the statistics were calculated by SPSS 22.0.Results show that both genre and process approaches effectively improved students' use of all the four categories of lexical chunks in HVC English writing,namely,complex word and poly-word use,frequent collocations,institutionalized utterances as well as sentence frames and heads.However,they varied in terms of the extent of improvement.Genre approach is more effective in improving the use of institutionalized utterances as well as sentence frames and heads;process approach is more helpful in boosting the use of frequent collocations.Both genre approach and process approach could effectively improve the use of complex word and poly-word in HVC English writing.This study is expected to shed some new lights on the effects of genre approach and process approach on distribution of lexical chunks for the freshmen in Higher Vocational College English writing,and thus improving their practical English writing proficiency.