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

As a kind of essential productive skill,writing is a critical indicator of English learners’ comprehensive competence of language application.However,writing has always been a weakness in English teaching.One of the reasons is that most students lack the storage of vocabulary and cannot effectively retrieve and appropriately use those vocabulary when writing.“Lexical Approach(LA)”,put forward by Michael Lewis in 1993,have been actively applied into practice by a lot of scholars since then and proved to be a positive role to improve writing score and interest.However,there are few empirical studies to investigate the effect of Lexical Approach on senior high school English writing teaching.Accordingly,this research attempts to apply Lexical Approach to English writing teaching in senior high school,aiming to explore the effectiveness of Lexical Approach on English writing teaching.The experiment involves 90 students from two parallel classes of Grade 1 in Shijiazhuang No.2 High School in Hebei Province and it lasts for one semester.Lexical Approach is adopted in the experimental class(EC)while Present-Practice-Product(PPP)teaching is used in the control class(CC).With test papers,Lexical Complexity Analyzer(LCA)and L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer(L2SCA)as the instruments,the research intends to answer the following two questions: what is the effect of Lexical Approach on lexical complexity of English writing of students in senior high school? What is the effect of Lexical Approach on their English writing fluency?According to the results,Lexical Approach can promote both lexical complexity and writing fluency in English writing significantly,esp.the lexical variation and lexical density in lexical complexity.Based on the experimental results,it is desirable for English teachers to learn about Lexical Approach,consciously cultivate students’ awareness of lexical chunks,and pay attention to the systematic learning and application of lexical chunks so as to improve students’ English writing ability.