An Empirical Study Of Developing Lexical Richness Of English Writing By Multiple-text-based Vocabulary Teaching In Junior School Students

Lexical richness,which measures the range of vocabulary use by speakers or writers,is considered as an important indicator of learners' writing quality.The assessment of lexical richness consists of four components,which are lexical variation,lexical sophistication,lexical density and lexical errors(Read,2000).This study explores the lexical richness of subjects' compositions from three dimensions which are lexical variation,lexical density and lexical errors.For English writing,most junior students tend to conceive the thought in mind in Chinese firstly,then try to translate the ideas with corresponding English vocabularies and sentence structures.However,the problems of inadequate vocabularies and failing to apply learned vocabularies flexibly and correctly cause their dull content in writing.Therefore,this study aims at developing students' lexical richness in writing through multiple-text-based vocabulary teaching.60 subjects from two parallel classes of junior eight are involved.The experiment,interview,and classroom observation are methods for this research.In experimental group,the multiple-text-based vocabulary teaching was conducted,and students were required to construct,process,and produce the target vocabularies based on multiple text reading.In control group,the traditional vocabulary teaching was carried out.Before experiment,the pre-test was carried out to assess the initial level in lexical richness by analyzing subjects' compositions,and the title for pre-test composition was the topic of unit 1in PEP textbook for the first semester of Grade Eight.After experiment,the post-test was the composition of final exam in the term of 2017-2018 of Wanan middle school.For measuring tools,RANGE is used to count the number of tokens and types,and TreeTagger is used to mark the part-of-speech in students' compositions,then Excel and SPSS17.0 are used to analyze the specific data.And the specific research questions are as follows:1.What are the differences in lexical variation in junior school students' compositions over a semester of study?2.What are the differences in lexical density in junior school students' compositions over a semester of study?3.What changes occur in lexical errors in junior school students' compositions over a semester of study?After data collection and analysis,the specific results are presented as follows:Firstly,for lexical variation,according to paired sample T-test,both of students in EG and CG have improved in lexical variation but not significant compared with pre-test over a semester of study.Secondly,for lexical density,according to paired sample T-test,both of students in EG and CG have developed but not significant compared with pre-test.Thirdly,for lexical errors,the mean values of EG respectively in pre-test and post-test are 0.086 and 0.052,while in CG are 0.081 and 0.073.The data shows that both of EG and CG have decrease in lexical errors.However,according to paired sample T-test,students in EG have a more significant decrease(P=0.00),which means they could use vocabularies more correctly,while the students of CG do not.(P=0.117)The purpose of this thesis is to develop the lexical richness in students' compositions by processing vocabularies based on multiple text reading,which can not only help students to accumulate and construct words comprehensively,but also has a positive influence on their comprehensive producing.