An Empirical Study On The Effects Of Lexical Approach On The Students' English Writing In Senior High Schools

As a requisite standard in evaluating English learners' production competence,writing is of great importance in English learning.However,writing was easily overlooked by Chinese students,especially for senior high school students.Some problems are existed in writing teaching and learning.Firstly,students spend a lot of time in remembering vocabularies and grammar structures,and then doing mechanical practices when they learn English.Secondly,English teachers in most schools advocate traditional teaching methods in English teaching,which put emphasis on grammar and mechanical exercises and ask students to remember writing samples.Therefore,the lexical approach provides a new idea to solving these problems.In 1993,Michael Lewis puts forward the term “Lexical Approach” with the core point “Language is not lexical grammar but grammaticalized lexis.” The new approach breaks the views held by traditional teaching approach that vocabularies and grammars are separated.The lexical approach maintained that lexical chunks are the basic units in English teaching as well as English learning.“Lexical chunks have more fixed grammatical structure,stable collocative meaning and specific pragmatic function”.It can be stored integrally in students' mind and then be wholly extracted and used in their writing,which can improve language output fluency and accuracy.Based on input hypothesis theory and lexical chunk theory,the thesis conducted an experiment using the lexical approach in English teaching.Meanwhile,the statistic software SPSS 25.0 was used to do some quantitative analysis in order to prove that lexical approach has effects on students' writing.Three research questions are as follows:(1)What is the variation in the frequency of lexical chunks of senior high school students' English writing after the lexical approach is implemented?(2)What is the variation in the frequency of different types of lexical chunks of senior high school students' English writing after the lexical approach is implemented?(3)What is the correlation between the frequency of lexical chunks and different types of chunks and writing scores in senior high school students' English writing after the lexical approach is implemented?The results of the research show:(1)The frequency(total quantity)of lexical chunks used by the EG is apparently higher than the CG.(2)The polywords are commonly used by both two groups.The EG students use more sentence builders and phrasal constraints in their writings after this experiment.(3)The outcomes show that there is positive correlation between the frequency of lexical chunks and frequency of four types of lexical chunks and English writing scores.As for the correlation between the frequency of lexical chunks and frequency of different types of chunks and writing scores,the correlation coefficients from high to low are as follows: frequency of lexical chunks,frequency of polywords,frequency of phrasal constraints,frequency of sentence builders and frequency of institutionalized expressions.