Chapter One Introduction
1.1Background of the research
English learning, an integral part of middle school education, is one of the basiccourses for students of science and art in China. Writing serves as an indispensable part oflanguage learning. In English learning process of all the four basic skills-listening,speaking, reading and writing, writing is believed to be the most difficult one for teachersto teach and learners to acquire.Given the importance and the requirements, writing in English should never be adifficult thing for students. The case, however, is that many students are very weak at thisproductive skill. On the one hand, English writing teachers argue that they make everyeffort to enliven the atmosphere of classroom, improve their teaching methods, stimulatestudents' participation; still，there is little improvement in students' writing. Writing is stilla much neglected part in English teaching, especially in senior high school in that there areso many teaching tasks for teachers to complete and writing teaching is a minor part oftheir teaching plan. The only concern for teachers is students' final product; students canseldom receive systematic instruction or efficient feedback. Moreover, whenever studentscome to ask for help, they lack knowledge of the techniques in the long run to share withthem besides telling them to recite more and imitate more. On the other hand, studentsnever stop complaining about the boredom of endless pattern drills in English class and thedifficulty in writing satisfactory compositions.
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1.2Reasons for the situation
Many researches have been done to explore the reasons for such a situation of Englishwriting in China. The teaching approach, in particular when vocabulary teaching taken intoconsideration, might be responsible for the writing stumble of students.For a long time here in China, methods of senior high school English teaching havenot been improved. Most schools still adopt the Grammar-Translation Method; otherschools, which are in more favorable conditions, may turn to the new risingCommunicative Approach. As to course design, there is no pision of listening, reading,speaking and writing; English is taken as a whole in senior high school. Moreover, thereare so many subjects for high school students (sometimes students may have finished morethan ten subjects in one semester), leaving little time for English class. Within the limitedtime the teachers have to duck the students as much information as possible. Writing is thekind of output you should devote a lot of time and energy to, so many teachers have toabandon writing teaching or give less attention to it despite the fact that they all know theimportance of writing. With so many subjects to be leamt and so much homework to befinished, students always staying up to complete their tasks, few will spare time to practicetheir English writing. The classic writing teaching method is as the following process: theteacher gives an assignment, and the students will finish the task after class (to save theprecious class time).
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Chapter Two Literature Review
2.1 Lexical phrase
Although it was brought forth at least as early as 1925 that foreign language teachersought to take account of conventionalized word strings, or lexical chunks (Palmer, 1925,reprinted 1999)，the teaching of lexical phrases was seldom given high priority by languageteaching methodologists and pedagogically orientated linguists throughout most of the 20thcentury.Lexical phrases have been studied under many rubrics, 'lexical chunks', ‘formulaicsequences', ‘fixed or semi fixed expressions', "prefabricated patterns' (or ‘prefabs,),'multi-word sequences' and ‘lexical bundles' included. To avoid misunderstanding andconfusion the paper adopts the term "lexical phrases" when we refer to this languagephenomenon.In the previous studies many researchers and scholars have been focused on itstheoretical part, trying to compare the different perspectives and approaches to multi-wordunits, proposing new outlines for analysis, and calling for further research. Hakuta (1974),Pawley and Syder (1983), Sinclair (1991), Lewis (1993), Weinert (1995)，Howarth (1996，1998a，1998b)，and Wray and Perkins (2000) are good examples of this type. Weinert(1995) identifies two basic research issues: the best way to define and identify fixedmulti-word units, and analysis of the discourse functions that these multi-word unitsperform.
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2.2 Lexical approach
The most influential teaching approach integrated with lexical chunks is “lexicalapproach" proposed by Michael Lewis. The term lexical approach was coined by Lewis in1993. Lewis retrospectively defined the lexical approach in 1997 as follows:The Lexical Approach places communication of meaning at the heart oflanguage and language learning. This leads to an emphasis on the main carrierof meaning, vocabulary. The concept of a large store of fixed and semi-fixedprefabricated items，which are available as the foundation for any linguisticnovelty or creativity, is of great importance for language learners. Most learners with “good vocabularies" have problems with fluency because their“collocational competence，，is very limited, so we should aim at increasing theircollocational competence with the vocabulary they have already got especially fromintermediate level For advanced learners, we should build on what they already know,using better strategies and increasing the number of items they meet outside the classroom.
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Chapter Three Methodology...........23
3.1Research questions.........23
3.2Subjects.........23
3.3Instruments.........24
3.3.1Pretest and Posttest.........24
3.3.2Interview.........25
3.4Procedure and data collection.........25
Chapter Four Results and Discussion.........32
4.1Analysis of the test results.........32
4.2Interview.........40
4.3Discussion.........42
Chapter Five Conclusion.........44
5.1Major findings.........45
5.2Pedagogical implications.........46
5.3Limitations of the present study.........47
5.4Suggestions for further study.........48
Chapter Four Results and Discussion
In this chapter data collected from the experiment would be analyzed by means ofSPSS 17.0. The test results (both pretest and posttest included) and the interview datawould be analyzed independently. The analysis of the test results would be pided intointer-group part and intra-group part, which cover the statistical data of students’compositions and the lexical phrases used in their writing. Paired Samples T-test of bothgroups and Independent Samples T-test between the two groups would be conducted sothat the results would be more reliable. The analysis of the test results was to testify therelationship between lexical phrases and students' writing proficiency. The interview wasanalyzed to find out about students' ideas and attitudes towards the newly adopted teachingapproach in the learning process of English writing.
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Conclusion
The results from the experiment and data analysis show that the writing performanceof the experimental group reaches a comparatively higher level than that of the controlgroup. In other words, lexical approach proves to be more effective in improving students'writing performance than traditional approach. The major findings are as follows:First of all, lexical phrases do contribute to students' writing proficiency. Data analysisabove shows that the mean score of EG in the posttest is higher than that of CG, implyingthat students in EG made greater progress than those in CG. Moreover, p<0.05, in otherwords, there is significant difference between CG and EG. Considering that there existedno significant difference between the writing proficiency of the two groups before theexperiment (see Table 2 and Table 3) and the two groups shared the same teacher and otherteaching resources except for the teaching of lexical phrases in EG, we can conclude thatlexical phrases play an important role in students' writing. The fact that the students'composition scores of EG in the posttest were higher than those in the pretest indicated thatstudents in EG improved their writing after the one-semester learning with the lexicalapproach. With all these data in the tables we can answer Question 1: lexical phrases doimprove students’ writing proficiency.
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Reference (omitted)