An Experimental Study On Lexical Approach In Senior High School English Writing Teaching

With the development of English language teaching reform,cultivating students' application ability has become one of the objectives in English teaching.English writing,as one of the four basic skills of English can particularly reflect students' ability of using language.However,writing has always been a weak part in foreign language teaching.For many students,it is difficult for them to write good compositions in a limited time.The main reason is that students are not good at using lexical chunks which can contribute to improving the efficiency of writing and the idiomaticity of language production in their writings.And the lexical chunks they used are in simple types and the accuracy is also lower.Therefore,how to improve students' writing skills has become one of the most important topics in foreign language teaching.In the mid-1970 s,foreign linguists put forward the concept of lexical chunks or similar concepts,and they found that lexical chunks have the irreplaceable advantages in language processing and understanding.Michael Lewis proposed the Lexical Approach to guide class instruction of chunks in 1993.Since then,many experts and scholars at home and abroad have performed many related researches.However,there are only a few empirical studies to explore the effect of Lexical Approach on senior high school English writing teaching.Therefore,this study applies the Lexical Approach to senior high school English writing to explore whether the Lexical Approach is effective in improving the complexity and accuracy of lexical chunks and discourse fluency in English writing.This experiment involved 88 students from two parallel classes of a senior high school in Tangshan,Hebei Province.The two classes were randomly selected as the experimental class and the control class.The experiment lasted for four months.Before the experiment,the pre-test was delivered to students of both two classes.The results of Independent-samples T test showed that the writing level of the two classes was equivalent and the results of Chi-square test showed that there was no significant difference in using lexical chunks in students' writing between the two classes.In the process of experiment,the Lexical Approach was applied to the experimental class,while the control class adopted the conventional teaching method.In order to further explore the effect of Lexical Approach on students' ability to use lexical chunks in writing,the researcher collected students' compositions after each unit learning,and there was a total of seven times by the end of semester.After the experiment,the post-test was delivered to students of both two classes.All students' writings collected during the experiment were typed into computer and converted into TXT.documents.AntConc3.5.8 was used to retrieve lexical chunks in writings,and all the data were submitted to descriptive analysis and Chi-square test with Excel and SPSS 19.0.The research proves the positive effect of Lexical Approach on senior high school English writing teaching.Compared with the control class,the complexity and accuracy of lexical chunks and discourse fluency of students' English writing in the experimental class improved significantly.The effect on the accuracy of lexical chunks and discourse fluency were obvious.However,the complexity and accuracy of lexical chunks and discourse fluency of students' English writing in the experimental class did not improved significantly until the mid and late period of the experiment.