An Experimental Study Of The Effect Of Lexical Approach On English Writing Competence Of Junior High School Students

It is required in the “English Curriculum Standards”(Ministry of Education, 2011) that students should be able to understand a language on some specific topics; students can apply appropriate words, phrases, or idioms to their writing and form a good writing habit. Although the New Curriculum and the entrance examination of senior high school raise their requirements, the present situation of students' writing is not satisfactory. Some serious problems exist in students' writing, for instance, insufficient chunks, chinglish, ungrammatical sentences as well as non-logical expressions.Research has shown that there are a lot of lexical chunks in a natural language. They have characteristics of both words and sentences. They are fixed or semifixed in a language, and they play an important role in language output process. On the basis of the feature of lexical chunks, Lewis put forward lexical approach which has been studied by many scholars at home and abroad both in theory and practice. Most of these studies are carried out among college students, while few of them aim at junior high school students. In light of this, the present study tries to explore the effect of lexical approach on English writing in junior high school, to find an effective way to improve students' writing ability and enhance their interest in writing. In this essay, the author tries to answer the following three questions: 1) Can lexical approach help improve learners' writing ability? 2) Can lexical approach help raise learners' interest in writing? 3) Can lexical approach help raise learners' awareness of using lexical chunks in writing?Based on the above understanding, a group of 80 junior students(2classes) from Yuwotou No. 2 Middle School in Nansha participated in this study. Two classes were randomly assigned as the experimental class and control class. The lexical approach was implemented in the experimental class. The instruments used in the experiment were questionnaires, pre-test, post-test and an interview. The conventional teaching method was used in the control class. The data of the experiment were analyzed by SPSS 21.0.Experimental results show that the interests of writing in EC have been enhanced and their writing scores are significantly better than the students in CC. This means that lexical approach do help to improve students' language accuracy, improve the flexibility of making sentences, and improve the continuity and smoothness of the different writing styles. Moreover, it is also found that lexical approach helps to promote students' awareness of using chunks. The data also shows that the quantity of the chunks is significantly correlated to the improvement of writing. Therefore, it can be concluded that the application of lexical approach in junior high school is feasible. The study also offers some implication of writing teaching in junior high school.