A Study On The Effects Of Lexical Approach On College Students’ English Writing Competence

As one of the four basic language skills, writing has always been taken as themost difficult one for college students to master. Lexical Approach, forwarded byMichael Lewis (1993), soon gets popularity in the field of applied linguistics.Employing lexical chunks is highly valued in Lexical Approach. Lexical chunks areready-made and prefabricated word phrases stored in learners’ brains, they aremeaningful word units rather than separate words. Combining form and functiontogether, lexical chunks are easy for learners to pick up and use. By making languageoutput more convenient, lexical chunks attract great attention in the field of Englishwriting teaching.Based on Michael Lewis’(1993) Lexical Approach, the writer tries to apply thismethod to college English writing class. With100subjects participated, a fourmonths’ study is conducted in a university located in Changchun city. These100subjects are from two parallel classes. The only difference between the two classes isthe teaching method with one being taught in Lexical Approach and the other one intraditional approach. The class using Lexical Approach is named Experimental Group,and the other one is Control Group, so students in Experimental Group will set up asense of employing lexical chunks. With the purpose of verifying the effects ofLexical Approach on improving college students’ English writing competence, threeresearch questions are designed by the writer as below:(1) What are thecharacteristics of the use of lexical chunks in students’ compositions before and afterthe teaching experiment?(2) What are the features of the composition scoredistribution in Experimental Group (EG) and Control Group (CG) and what’s therelationship between the use of lexical chunks and composition scores before andafter the teaching experiment?(3) What attitudes do the students in EG have towardtheLexical Approach?Both quantitative and qualitative study are carried out to make sure the reliabilityand validity of the research. Quantitative study includes pretest writing, posttestwriting while qualitative study involves interviews. SPSS17.0is used to analyze the collected data, which includes descriptive statistics, independent samples T-test. Theresults indicate that Lexical Approach is effective in improving college students’English writing competence.At the end of the thesis, the limitations of the study are pointed out and somesuggestions are also put forward for future study.