The Application Of Lexical Approach In Senior High School English Continuation Writing Teaching

Writing is an important language output skill.It is also an important embodiment of comprehensive language use ability.In recent years,many provinces and cities have adopted“English continuation writing” as a new type of English writing in the new college entrance examination in English subject.It aims to test students’ English core competences such as information comprehension,language use,discourse construction and creative thinking.Students need to meet higher requirements for this writing type such as the consistency of logic,the richness of content,the accuracy of language,the coherence of discourse and so on.However,present situation of English continuation writing teaching in senior high school at home is not optimistic.Little attention is paid to the English continuation writing teaching,which causes low teaching efficiency and students’ fear and anxiety when writing.Furthermore,the English Curriculum Standards of Senior High school have put forward higher requirements for students’ English writing.It is urgent to solve students writing problems,including the lack of vocabulary,inaccurate use of words,poor coherence between sentences and paragraphs and so on.Facing with problems above,lexical approach,a language teaching method that advocates the integration of lexical chunk meaning,form and context into teaching,has attracted increasing attention in recent years and triggered many scholars’ exploration and research.Based on this point,this study attempts to regard input hypothesis and output hypothesis as the theoretical basis and applies the lexical approach proposed by Lewis to senior high school students’ English continuation writing,then to answer the following four questions:(1)Can the lexical approach improve senior high school students’ performance in English continuation writing?(2)What are teachers’ and students’ opinions towards the English continuation writing teaching based on the lexical approach in senior high school?To answer questions above,in this study,two parallel classes of the grade two of a senior high school in Lanxi,Zhejiang Province were selected as participants for an experimental study for a semester.Class 5 was the experimental class taught by lexical approach while Class 6 was the control class taught by traditional teaching method.Besides,this research collected experimental data based on students’ performance in English continuation writing before and after the experiment.Interviews were also conducted among nine students from experimental class and five teachers participating in listening to the class in this grade to get real feedback for analysis.The results of the study showed that:(1)After the experiment,students in experimental class and control class all improve their English continuation writing performance.But influenced by the lexical approach,students in experiment class not only enhance their English continuation writing ability steadily but the degree of improvement is significantly higher than that of the control class.(2)The application of lexical approach in senior high school English continuation writing is helpful to improve the teaching efficiency,which also changes students’ attitude towards English continuation writing positively.To sum up,applying the lexical approach to the senior high school English continuation writing teaching can help students improve their English continuation writing performance and strengthen their awareness of using lexical chunks.Based on the results of the study,several teaching suggestions are put forward as reference for teachers to carry out English continuation writing teaching or related research in the future:(1)Update the teaching concept of “English continuation writing” and try to use the “Lexical Approach”.(2)Input comprehensible lexical chunks based on the context in discourse.(3)Accumulate and consolidate lexical chunks with the help of multiple training.(4)Arrange English continuation writing exercise when appropriate to strengthen the ability of outputting lexical chunks.