Abstract:Structural approach and communicative approach which focuses play a vital role in the developing history of language teaching practice. Structural approach claims that language is a dichotomy of grammar and lexicon. This implies that grammar is the basic frame and lexicon is the filler. Communicative approach sees language primarily as a means of transmitting and receiving meaning, with grammar and the form of language neglected. Lexical approach combines the characteristics of structural approach and communicative approach, and becomes the form/function composites. Lexical approach as a bridge to overcome the shortcomings of the afore-mentioned two approaches becomes the ideal approach for foreign language teaching. Fixed or semi-fixed lexical chunks exist somewhere between grammar and lexicon and combine the feature of lexicon and syntax. They may be the smallest units of language communication. These lexical chunks are the combinations of grammar, language meaning and context. Lexical approach was first put forward by Lewis in 1993. Its fundamental principle is that “language consists of grammaticalised lexis, not lexicalized grammar”. It is based on the idea that an important part of language acquisition is the ability to comprehend and produce lexical chunks as unanalyzed wholes or “chunks”. So the lexical-chunk approach concentrates on developing learners’ proficiency with lexical chunks.
In China, College English teaching has gained much influence from structural approach and communicative approach for a long time. English learning has stressed too much on the grasp of language structure and its form. To some extent, this leads to the phenomenon that English writing as a very important productive skill is not correspondingly improved. This study aims to testify the hypothesis that teaching lexical chunk in the intensive reading classroom setting plays an important role in improving non-English majors’ writing performance.
The subjects in the study were 66 freshmen from two intact classes in Henan Mechanical and Electrical Engineering College being taught by the author, each class consisting of 33 students. The two classes are designated as one experimental group which adopts the lexical approach and one control group which adopts the traditional approach. At the beginning and the end of the term, students in two groups are required to write a composition respectively within thirty minutes according to the CET-4 writing requirements. The composition scores of each student and the number of lexical chunks used in each composition were collected and entered into SPSS 16.0 for statistical analysis. The results show that all the groups have made progress, but the students from EG have made more significant progress and use more lexical chunks than students from CG. Pearson correlation coefficients show further that the number of lexical chunks used has positive correlation with students’ composition scores.
This thesis is divided into 5 chapters: introduction, literature review, empirical research design, results and discussion, and conclusion. The dissertation is structured as follows. Chapter one covers the research background and the organization of the thesis. Chapter two presents the literature review, which includes the description of lexical chunks, theoretical bases, previous findings from different perspectives, and teaching approaches applying lexical chunks. Chapter three introduces the empirical research design and its procedure. Chapter four is about the statistical analysis of the research. Statistic results are discussed in detail. Finally, it comes to chapter five, including the major findings and implications. Limitations of the present study as well as recommendations for further studies will also be discussed in this part.
KEY WORDS: lexical chunks, lexical approach, non-English majors, writing
