A Study Of The Effects Of Lexical Approach On Linguistic Accuracy In Writing

As English is attracting increasingly interests from Chinese students in recent years, its teaching approaches are receiving more and more attention. In grammar-focused teaching approaches, we find that even though some students have mastered certain writing skills and vocabularies, they are still not able to use words and sentence patterns that they have learnt accurately. And, many errors occurred in their compositions. In the author’s point of view, the linguistic accuracy in writing contains two parts:language expressions are accurate in grammar and appropriate in usage. Meanwhile, the author thinks one of the reasons for a lack of linguistic accuracy is that there is not an appropriate teaching approach. Lexical approach offers a considerable way to solve this problem. Michael Lewis put forward a new teaching approach--the lexical approach in1993with the core theory "language is not lexical grammar but grammaticalized lexis.’ The new approach breaks the idea held by conventional teaching approach that lexis and grammar are separated, and stresses the actual utility of language.Based on Michael Lewis’ lexical approach and its basic concept of lexical chunks, the thesis applied an experiment using the lexical approach in English teaching. Meanwhile, the statistic software SPSS was utilized to do some quantitative analysis among lexical chunks and inaccurate language in students’ writing to proves that lexical approach has effects on students’ writing accuracy.In this empirical study, the author carried out a teaching experiment for one semester. The subjects of this experimental research are freshmen from two classes of Hunan Mass Media Vocational Technical College majoring anchor. The two classes were selected as experiment group (EG) and control group (CG) randomly. Both students have the same English level and the same textbook. Then, the author was in charge of their College English course as well. The only difference between these two groups was that:during the teaching process, the author used lexical approach in EG. Through a large number of lexical chunk exercises, the teacher helped students to build the concept of lexical chunks. While in CG teacher used the normal teaching approaches without introducing the concept of chunks and emphasizing the chunk exercises in purpose. Before and after the experiment, two groups were required to have a pre-test and a post-test, which means the teacher asked these subjects to write a composition of the same topic respectively within limited time. The teacher, then, collected their scores, the inaccurate language points in their compositions, and differential count of chunks in four categories in both pre-test and post-test. All the figures above were used as experiment data. Then, the data were analyzed and compared by statistic software SPSS13.0Comparing the experiment data we find that, the number of lexical chunks in EG is more than CG which shows the lexical approach has some effects during the teaching process and it arouses the students’ awareness of lexical chunks. On the other hand, the inaccurate language points in EG is fewer than CG. It demonstrates that the lexical approach benefits linguistic accuracy of students’ writing. Thereby, the scores of compositions are enhanced to some extent. Based on the research, the thesis drew a conclusion that lexical approach has positive effects on students’ linguistic accuracy of writing.