An Application Of Lexical Approach In English Writing Teaching In High Schools Of Rural Areas

Lexical chunks are defined as “multi-word lexical phenomena”.They can be acquired and stored in the mind integrally and be extracted as prefabricated phrases to use.The application of lexical chunks can help students improve their English ability.Although many studies have probed into the use of lexical approach and great contribution have been made to improve students' writing ability,few of the studies concentrate on the application of lexical chunks to the students in rural areas where the students have poor writings because of inefficient methods of writing teaching.Faced with the high-demanding National Entrance Exam in which the writing part requires accurate use of ample vocabulary,coherence and fluency of the discourse,etc.,students in rural areas have great difficulty in meeting the requirements to get high marks.Therefore,the present thesis is conducted and the research questions are as follows:1)Can lexical approach improve English writing performance for high school students in rural areas?2)What is the correlation between the number of lexical chunks and the performance of the writing?3)Can the application of lexical chunks affect the students' attitude towards English writing in rural senior high schools?The author carried out a three-months' experiment in Guanghe Senior High School in Gansu.Two classes of Senior One were randomly selected as the experiment class(EC)and control class(CC),respectively 40 students and 38 students.The lexical approach was conducted in EC,where the teacher helps students improve the information processing ability by applying lexical chunks,while a regularly-used approach was conducted in CC.The instruments in this research are test,questionnaire,the criteria of scoring and a reference table for counting the lexical chunks in students' writings.Data was collected from the tests and questionnaires and qualitative and quantitative methods were used to analyze the data by applying SPSS 22.0.The result of the research indicates that the application of lexical approach can help students in rural areas improve their writing performance and a positive correlation exists in the number of lexical chunks and the performance of the writing.What's more,lexical approach can motivate students' interest and help students maintain positive attitude to English writing.The implication got from the study is that teachers should lay emphasis on getting students to be aware of lexical chunks,help to enrich the students' lexical chunks and motivate the students to autonomously use lexical chunks when practising writing.