Effects Of Lexical Approach To Teaching On Lexical Complexity In Junior High School Students’ English Writings

Vocabulary is the basis of language acquisition and plays an important role in second language acquisition.In recent years,more and more scholars have paid much attention to lexical chunk and applied them to daily teaching.Some studies have shown that the teaching based on lexical approach can exert a positive impact on students’ listening,speaking,reading and writing ability.However,in these researches,whether students acquire vocabulary is mostly evaluated by their writing scores,which is undoubtedly subjective.As we all know,lexical complexity is an important indicator of students’ writing ability.Therefore,the study will explore the effect of lexical approach to teaching on lexical complexity in junior high school students’ writings.Based on Lewis’ lexical approach,constructive theory,input and output theory,the research questions to be addressed here:1)Can lexical approach to teaching change junior high school students’ current writing situation?2)Can junior high school students’ lexical complexity be improved through the application of lexical approach?The experiment conducted for 3 months and the research subjects were 86 students in grade one in junior high school.In the experimental class,lexical approach method was adopted while the traditional vocabulary and writing teaching method was adopted in the controlled class.Two classes’ compositions were processed before and after the experiment,and the data were analyzed by using the SPSS 23.0,Range32,and Vocabprofile.The results were as follows:1)Lexical approach to teaching can change students’ current writing situation.Firstly,it can improve students’ writing level.The writing level in experimental class improves greatly while the controlled class doesn’t change much.And there are significant differences after teaching experiment.Secondly,lexical approach to teaching can improve the chunk frequency in students’ writing,in which phrasal chunks are improved obviously while sentence-like chunks are improved slightly.2)In terms of vocabulary complexity,Lexical approach to teaching can improve lexical variation in students’ writings.After the experiment,there is obvious difference between the two classes.However,the teaching method exert little effect on lexical density and lexical sophistication.Based on the above research results,the author suggests that lexical approach can be used in daily teaching to cultivate students’ awareness and ability of using lexical chunks,which is somewhat conducive to improving lexical variation in students’ writing.The study is bound to have some limitations.Thus,more students’ samples in longer time should be explored in future researches.