An Experimental Study On The Effects Of Lexical Approach On Senior High School Students’ English Writing

Writing,as the reflection and one of the most important indicators of students’ comprehensive English ability,is currently receiving increasing attention in the second language teaching practice and language examination.On the one hand,with the deepening of curriculum reform,especially after the promulgation and implementation of The National English Curriculum Standards for Senior High School(2020 Revised Edition),the quality of English talent training in the new era has set higher and more specific standard for writing,one of the expressive skills.On the other hand,the realistic situation of English writing for senior high school students in China is dissatisfying: students lack interest in writing and their expressions are not rich and diverse enough,frequent Chinglish and grammatical errors affect the accuracy of students’ expression,etc.Therefore,how to improve students’ English writing is one of the problems worthy of in-depth study and in need of an urgent solution in foreign language teaching.In recent years,the development of the Lexical Approach has provided a direction for English writing teaching in senior high schools.The present study applies this approach to English writing teaching in senior high school in order to explore the effects of this approach on accuracy,fluency,and complexity of senior high school students’ English writing.This study is conducted in two parallel classes in Grade Two of Luquan No.1 High School in Shijiazhuang.In the experimental class,the Lexical Approach is adopted,with the focus on cultivating students’ awareness of lexical chunks,to strengthen their accumulation and use of lexical chunks;in the control class,the process approach to writing is adopted without introducing the concept of lexical chunks.Before and after the experiment,students in these two classes are tested and interviewed.After the experiment,the relevant data of students’ compositions and interviews are analyzed by L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer(L2SCA)and SPSS 26.0,respectively.The experiment results show that the applying of Lexical Approach significantly improves students’ writing accuracy and fluency.Analysis of the data shows that students in the experimental class have significantly fewer errors in their post-test composition than those students in the control class,which indicates that the accuracy and fluency of students’ writing in the experimental class have been significantly improved.However,there is no significant increase in the complexity of students’ writing in the experimental class.The interview results with the students are consistent with this.