An Empirical Study Of Lexical Approach In College English Fixed-Time Writing

In recent 20 years, contemporary linguistics has paid more and more attention to vocabulary research and the application of lexical approach is becoming increasingly extensive. Lexical Approach is theoretically based on Michael Lewis'principle"language consists of grammaticalized lexis not lexicalized grammar", promoting the lexical chunks are recognized as the core in language teaching. In lexical Approach, comprehension and output of chunks are two aspects of great importance in language acquisition.This study starts from lexical approach, exploring the association between the quality of fixed-time college English writing and lexical approach by empirical study and attempting to further understand and expand the previous theory, so that foreign language teaching could be advanced.Chunks are stored as wholes in brain and multi-word units can be used as prefabricated chunks. Becker states that the memorization and storage, output and use of language are not based on single words. It is the fixed and semi-fixed structures are the smallest units of human communication. Chunks have relatively fixed grammatical structure constraints, stable collocation meaning and particular language context. Besides, they are the unity of grammatical rules, semantic meanings and pragmatic contexts, which contributes to language fluency and language creativity.The sample in this study consists of two classes: the students in Grade 1 of Pre-school Education Department from Chongqing Normal University. They are selected as experimental group and control group at random. In the teaching process, two different teaching methods are applied to the two groups: lexical approach in the experiment group and traditional teaching method in the control group. The experiment was conducted in the first semester in 2010. In this period, Class 1 wrote two compositions, Class 2 three ones. The two classes are required to respectively write two compositions of the same topics at the very beginning and at the end of the term. In addition, class 2 had to finish another one after the first two ones under the free-time condition. According to the data collected, SPSS13.0 is adopted for quantitative analysis.After careful design of the experiment and scientific data analysis, the results are as follows:1) Lexical approach can improve the students'writing proficiency;2) Of the four kinds of lexical chunks, the highest use frequency is phrasal constraints, and the lowest is institutionalized expression;3) Compared with the free-time writing, fixed-time writing contributes more to quality of composition.