| Writing ability can reflect English learners’ comprehensive English proficiency and has a significant impact on students’ learning and development.However,the problem of “separation of learning and using” has affected the improvement of students’ writing ability,which is the essential problem of curriculum reform of elementary foreign language teaching in the new era.In order to solve this problem,Wen Qiufang(2015)proposed the Production-Oriented Approach(POA).But the studies on POA in English teaching are situated mainly in senior high schools and colleges.In terms of research subjects,scholars pay more attention to the whole class rather than students at different levels.Therefore,this study explores the influence of POA on the English writing ability of middle school students at different levels by analyzing the changes of their lexical and syntactic complexity in compositions.Based on the studies on POA,this thesis investigated the lexical and syntactic complexity of 192 students’ compositions with the lexical complexity analyzer and L2 syntactic complexity analyzer by taking 24 Grade 2 students in a middle school in Jiangsu Province as the research subjects(12 students of high level group and 12 students of low level group).Besides,a questionnaire survey on the students before and after the experiment was conducted.It attempts to answer the following research questions: 1)What effect does POA have on the lexical complexity of English writings of middle school students at different proficiency levels? 2)What effect does POA have on the syntactic complexity of English writings of middle school students at different proficiency levels?It was found that POA can improve the lexical and syntactic complexity of students at different proficiency levels,but the improvement is more obvious for high level students.Among the three dimensions of lexical complexity,the lexical density of high and low level students is significantly affected by POA,which improves the abundance of writing contents while there is no significant change of lexical sophistication in high and low level students’ writings.In terms of lexical variation,there are significant differences in the use of verbs,adjectives and adverbs,which contributes to the diversified expressions in their writings.Among the five dimensions of syntactic complexity,POA has different influence on students at different levels.In the length of production,POA has a great impact on high level students while it improves MLS and MLT of low level students.For coordination,there is a significant difference in the use of CP/C and CP/T of high level students while there is no significant difference for low level students.With respect to particular structures,POA has a great improvement on both level students on VP/T,while high level students experience a significant improvement on CN/C.As for sentence complexity and subordination,both level students don’t experience a significant change.To sum up,POA helps both high and low level students produce longer sentences and more verb phrases,enriching the writing contents.It also promotes the use of coordinate phrases and complex nominals of high level students so as to make their compositions more cohesive.As syntax is more complex than lexis,the improvement of syntactic complexity of students at different levels,especially of low level students,is relatively small.In the design of teaching procedures,syntactic enabling activities should be increased and strengthened to improve students’ understanding and using of syntactic literacy.In addition,considering that the lexical sophistication for both high and low level students has not significantly been improved and that students at different levels have the tendency of avoiding using more complex language items which affects the improvement of writing ability,it is necessary to raise the frequency of the use of complex language items in enabling and assessing to solve the problem of separation of learning and using. |
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