A Study On The Effects Of Lexical Approach On Junior High School Students' English Writing Scores And Learning Motivation

With the rapid development of economic globalization in modern society,as an international language,English plays more and more important role in international communication.Moreover,with the globalization of social economy in China,the demand for high-quality English talents is also increasing.English writing ability is one of the major factors to judge English talents' professional quality and ability,and the quality of English writing instruction will have a direct effect on the number of the high-quality English talents.Therefore,it is necessary to do some researches in English writing instruction.English writing is a synthesis of many linguistic factors,such as vocabulary,grammar,text,paragraphs,translation,etc.It is precisely because of the synthesis of writing that English writing has always been a weak link for Chinese students.And there are still a great number of problems in junior high school English writing instruction.At present,English writing instruction in junior high school is mainly guided by the traditional teaching method that the teachers give the topic and subsequently analyze and explain the writing skills for students,and finally give examples to the students to imitate the writing.In the process of writing,teachers generally give priority to whether the sentences written by students are appropriate or not,whether the grammar is correct or not,and so on.They do not pay enough attention to the students' thinking of language expression in the process of writing,and their guidance to the students'writing does not go in to the essence.As a result,the cognitive subject role of the students has not been fully realized.In view of this situation,the author tries to implement junior high school English instruction from the perspective of lexical chunks,and discusses the effect of the lexical approach on improving junior high school students' English writing achievement and learning motivation by strengthening their awareness of using lexical chunks.Therefore,the specific research questions are as follows:1.What effects does lexical approach have on students' English writing scores?2.What effects does lexical approach have on students' learning motivation?3.What are students',attitudes towards lexical approach and what are student's suggestions on implementing lexical approach?This study uses a pre-test and post-test comparison group quasi-experimental design.The two classes were chosen from a junior high school,which is located in Xi'an,Shaanxi Province.The research subjects of this study are 100 students of Grade seven,including 50 students in the experimental class and 50 students in the control class.The two classes were randomly regarded as the control class(CC)and the experimental class(EC)respectively.And the experimental class was instructed English in the lexical approach,while the control class was taught with traditional English teaching method,that is the PPP model,namely Presentation,Practice and Production.During the whole teaching process,the teacher does not guide students to use lexical chunks to express their meaning,and the students are not very clear about the concept of lexical chunks.The research period lasts for one semester,that is,17 weeks,from March in 2018 to July in 2018.The author utilizes triangulation into this study.There is a combination between quantitative research methods and qualitative research methods to examine the effects of lexical approach.The quantitative research encompasses experimental method and scale-based testing method,and the qualitative research involves semi-structured interview.As to quantitative research,besides the teaching experiment,the scientific scale with high validity and reliability is employed here.It is Learning Motivation Scale.As to qualitative research,an interview is designed to seek out supportive reasons of quantitative results and collect students' opinions about the functions of lexical approach as well as their suggestions on the implementation of lexical approach.After data collection,the author adopted independent sample T test and paired sample T test to examine significant differences with SPSS 22.0.In addition,NVivo 10 was used in the qualitative data analysis to figure out supportive reasons for the quantitative results.Through the one-semester teaching experiment,the author achieved the following main findings:1.The lexical approach has significantly enhanced students' English writing scores.2.The lexical approach has significantly improved students' learning motivation.3.The interview indicates that the students benefit a lot in their writing from the lexical approach and most subjects have positive attitudes towards the lexical approach.At the same time,some subjects put forward their suggestions about the implement of the lexical approach in the teaching,which is of great importance for teachers to improve their teaching in real teaching.