A Study Of Lexical Approach In EFL Writing

In the history of language teaching approach development, structural approach and communicative approach played a very important role. Structural approach emphasized grammar, while communicative approach put its emphasis on the appropriate usage in the context. With lexical chunks as the core and based on the cognitive psychology, lexical approach is a kind of compromise between structural approach and communicative approach. Lexical chunks are the ready-made memorized combinations in the language. Once they are acquired and stored in the human brain, they are easily retrievable and accessible. Besides, they are context-bound and occur quite frequently, which makes them highly memorable for students. Writing is the hardest one of the four skills in foreign language acquisition, but the present situation of Chinese college students' writing is far from satisfactory. In this paper, lexical approach is introduced as a new way to improve EFL writing. An empirical study is made of the students' compositions aiming at investigating whether the learning of lexical chunks improves EFL writing.The experiment involved 72 sophomores coming from two naturally occurring classes in Wuhan University, 36 students in each class. The two classes were designated randomly as one experimental group and one control group. In this experiment, the control group was taught in the traditional teaching method through the whole term. In the mean time, lexical approach was applied to the experimental group. In the term, 72 students were asked to write five compositions according to the CET-4 writing requirements. The first, the third and the fifth compositions of each student were selected and the number of lexical chunks in them was entered into SPSS 13.0 for analysis. The results showed that all the students made progress, while the students from EG made more progress than the students from CG The students from EG used more lexical chunks in their compositions than the students from CG The interview suggested that the students favored lexical approach. They thought learning lexical chunks helped them write good compositions. Besides, the chunksused by the students in their compositions were analyzed.There are totally six chapters in this thesis. The first chapter is an introduction to one part of language teaching history. The second chapter reviews both lexical approach and lexical chunks. In the review of lexical approach, its cognitive basis and the basic ideas are given in details. And then, definitions and classifications of lexical chunks brought out by the linguists all over the world are presented. Besides, the roles lexical chunks play in first and second language acquisition are introduced. In Chapter Three, lexical approach is introduced as a new way to teach EFL writing. Chapter Four presents the research design, including the hypotheses, the participant description, and experiment procedures. The experiment results are analyzed in Chapter Five. Finally, a conclusion is drawn in Chapter Six.