An Empirical Study Of The Impact Of Lexical Approach On EFL Writing Level Of Junior College Students

The studies of corpus linguistics and applied linguistics home and abroad find that language is made up of a large number of lexical chunks. Lexical chunks can help language learners mater grammar rules, achieve idiomaticity and appropriacy of expression, and facilitate language production. The lexical approach is a kind of compromise between structural approach and communicative approach because it stresses both grammar and proper usage of language in the context. On the other hand, writing is very hard for second language learners as it requires them to express themselves fluently and accurately. And the present situation of Chinese junior college students’English writing is far from satisfactory. Therefore, the author conducted an empirical study, applying the lexical approach into Chinese junior college students’ English writing class, to testify its impact on their English writing.The research questions of this study are:(1) Are lexical chunks learnable and teachable?(2) Can lexical approach give an impact on English writing level of junior college students? If so, does it improve their English writing level? The experiment involved71sophomores coming from two naturally occurring classes in Zhixing College, Hubei University. The two classes designated randomly as an experimental group and a control group. The experimental group was taught with lexical approach while the control group did without it. The study lasted one semester. In the beginning, middle, and end of the term, all students were asked to write3compositions respectively according to CET-3writing requirements and underline lexical chunks on three passages respectively. All the data were entered into SPSS16.0for analysis.The author compared and analyzed the number of lexical chunks which students of two groups underlined in three passages, the composition scores and the number of lexical chunks used in their three writing tests. Results showed that (1) the students of EG could identify more lexical chunks than that of CG after the teaching experiment, which means that lexical chunks can be teachable and learnable;(2) the students of EG got higher composition scores than that of CG after the teaching experiment, which indicates that the lexical approach has a positive influence on English writing level of junior college students and could help them improve writing level. In addition, the results of Pearson correlation coefficient showed that lexical chunks have positive correlation with students’ composition scores.