On The Effects Of The Lexical Approach On Senior High School Students’ Lexical Richness In English Writing

Based on the higher requirements for students’ English writing proposed by 2017 National English Curriculum Standard,this study conducted lexical approach that combines reading and writing based on the actual writing situation of the research participants.Using lexical approach to input a lot of context-based lexical chunks and take students’ writing as output,that is,lexical approach is carried out in the combination of reading and writing.Lexical approach is a teaching method proposed by Lewis,who holds that the basic unit of language is lexical chunks rather than words.Based on the chunking theory of psychology,taking Krashen’s input hypothesis and Swain’s output hypothesis as the theoretical foundation,this study adopts lexical approach to give students a large number of context-based chunks input and take students’ writing as output.Two questions were answered: 1.What is the current situation of lexical study and teaching in X high school? 2.What is the effect of the lexical approach on X high school students ’ lexical richness in English writing?In this study,53 senior two students of the experimental science class in X middle school of Chengdu were selected as the research subjects.The questionnaire method is applied to investigate the current situation of students’ lexical study and teacher’s lexical teaching.Lexical approach teaching experiment that combines reading and writing was carried out for students’ lexical learning,and the experiment lasts one semester.In addition,this study also adopted the corpus method to build the students’ composition corpus.SPSS23,Range 32,Ant Conc 3.5.8 word processing software and CLAWS5 2019 part-of-speech tagging software were used to process the data.The lexical richness of students’ compositions was measured by the three indexes: lexical variation,lexical density and lexical sophistication.According to the results,it shows that lexical approach has a positive effect on the lexical variation and lexical density in students’ writing,the most obvious change is in lexical density.However,due to the limitation of the types and contents of high school English writing,it does not have a significant effect on the lexical sophistication.Through empirical research,this study makes a beneficial exploration of the lexical chunks teaching based on unit theme.The research shows that both teachers and students should have the awareness of lexical chunks.If teachers can provide students with a large number of opportunities to input,practice and use chunks based on theme-based context,it can promote students’ accumulation and use of lexical chunks more effectively so as to improve their writing.