An Empirical Study On The Effect Of Lexical Approach On The English Writing Of Senior High School Students

Writing is an important part of English teaching in senior high school.It is also vital embodiment of English level and an obvious index of language proficiency.Writing is the most difficult aspect in English teaching of senior high school.Although English teachers and students work very hard in writing,it is the weakest field for students.Therefore,better teaching approach is required urgently to explore in order to improve the present status of English writing in the senior high schools of remote area.Linguistic researches have indicated that there exist a large number of fixed and semi-fixed expressions in natural language,which are called lexical chunks.They are regarded as the ideal units for language processing.Lexical chunks can increase the speed of linguistic processing and play a critical role in language input and output.However,most of the current studies on lexical chunks abroad and at home still stay the level of theory.In China,there exist some empirical researches on lexical chunks,but they are carried out with college students.And in remote area,English teachers seldom put the lexical approach into use in the teaching of English writing,and even they are not familiar with this innovative approach.Under the guidance of the previous relevant researches and based on the input and output hypothesis and information processing theory,this research adopts writing tests,questionnaires and interviews as the research tools to explore the effect of lexical approach on English writing in remote area.Meanwhile,this research also investigates the classroom participants'attitude towards lexical approach in order to conduct it in the English writing teaching of senior high school in remote area more effectively.Four specific research questions are to be answered:(1)What are the effects of lexical approach on senior high school students' English writing ability?(2)To what extent does the lexical approach have influence on the students' use of lexical chunks in English writing at total and the four types of lexical chunks level?(3)What's the correlation between the use of lexical chunks and English writing ability?(4)What are the participants'attitudes toward the application of lexical approach to the teaching of English Writing?The subjects of the research come from two natural classes of Grade One from Zi Yun Minority Senior High School,Zi yun Miao and Buyi Autonomous County,Guizhou province.Class 23 is randomly designated as the experimental class,while class 24 is taken as the controlled class.Both classes were taught by the same English teacher and the students use the same teaching materials.The author is the teacher of the two classes.Lexical approach is applied in experimental class while in the controlled class the traditional teaching method is employed.The duration of the experiment is a whole semester with four months.Before the experiment,the questionnaires and writing tests are employed in the experimental class and controlled class to get information about their writing status and writing levels.The research data is quantitatively analyzed by using SPSS 20.0.The results show that before the experiment,there is no significant difference between the two classes in the aspects of English writing scores and lexical chunks numbers.After the experiment,the post-test composition is conducted in both of the classes.The questionnaires and interviews are only employed in the experimental classes.Then the author adopts quantitative and qualitative approaches to analyze the results.The statistical results of the study show:(1)The pariticipants in experimental class have made obvious progress in both the English writing scores and the lexical chunks numbers compared with the students in controlled class as well as themselves.Nevertheless,students in controlled class are not improved significantly from pre-test to post-test.(2)Through analyzing the overall characteristics of lexical chunks,proportion and distribution of the four types of lexical chunks,it is found that the number of words and frequency of lexical chunks have increased remarkably.Polywords and phrasal constraints are the most predictive for students' writing scores,while the impact of institutionalized expressions is minimal.(3)The results of the experiment prove that there exist positive correlation between the total and four types of lexical chunks numbers and composition scores.(4)The statistical results of questionnaires and interviews indicate that the implementation of lexical approach raises students' awareness of lexical chunks.Participants are highly stimulated in English writing and get more confidence.Most learners hold positive attitude towards the lexical approach.The implications of the present research can be obtained as follows:In the future's English writing instruction,classroom practitioners should cultivate the learners' awaren-ess of lexical chunks through various teaching tasks and provide the participants with a plenty of opportunities to practice and input lexical chunks in specific contexts.Teachers should encourage students to frequently use the learned lexical chunks in their compositions.By conducting the lexical approach,students' attitude towards English writing can be improved,and their English writing ability can be raised obviously.