The Application Of Output-based Lexical Approach To College English Writing

Writing is an important skill for college students to acquire, specified in College English Syllabus. Many students often complain that they can not express their ideas accurately and fluently, even with a set of syntactic rules and large vocabulary. According to the author's survey, the lack of depth of word knowledge and the insufficiency of writing output are most common problems in college English writing. Therefore, the thesis aims at applying output-based Lexical Approach to intensive reading class, to find out whether the output-based Lexical Approach can effectively improve students'English writing performance in College English Test Band Four (hereafter shorten CET-4).The experiment, which lasted three mouths, involved 85 second-year non-English majors, coming from two regular classes in Chongqing University of Technology (hereafter shorten CQUT). The subjects were randomly selected as Empirical Group (hereafter shorten EG) and Control Group (hereafter shorten CG). The experiment exposed the CG to traditional teaching approach and EG to the output-based Lexical Approach in intensive reading class, whose core is to raise the students'awareness of lexical chunks and lead students to learn and use lexical chunks appearing in the text through output tasks. During the experiment, students were required to finish a pre-test and a post-test (CET-4 Test), and interviews were conducted in the EG to survey the subjects'opinions about the output-based Lexical Approach.The software SPSS13.0 was applied to analyze data collected. The result indicates that students of EG and CG had similar writing proficiency before the experiment, while students in the EG outperformed students in the CG in holistic score after the experiment. Students in the EG also have achieved significant progress in the number of lexical chunks, the number of error free T-unit, and mean length of error free T-unit used in their compositions, in comparison with the students in the CG or with themselves. That is to say, the students in EG possessed relatively high writing capacity. During the experiment, all conditions were almost the same, except teaching method. Thus, the conclusion can be drawn that the output-based Lexical Approach in intensive reading class significantly improved students'writing performance in CET-4.