A Study Of Lexical Chunks In College English Writings

For a long time, there has been two basic teaching approaches in foreign language teaching:one is the traditional teaching method based on the single word and grammar, which pays much attention to vocabulary and sentence structure analysis, but neglects the actual communicative function of language; the other one is centered on communicative competence, which focuses on the social communication of language, but learners are likely to neglect the mastery of basic language knowledge. In recent years, with the development and application of corpus linguistics and pragmatics, lexical chunks, as a language unit with the characteristics of both lexis and grammar, have gradually gained great attention from home and abroad. There are a lot of fixed or semi-fixed language units in the language, which are stored in the brain and retrieved as a whole from the memory. These language units can be defined as"lexical chunks".In view of increasing importance of lexical chunks study in the field of linguistics, taking Nattinger and DeCarrico (1992)"s definition and classification of lexical chunks as the basic theoretical frame and adopting qualitative and quantitative research methods, the author of this paper makes a study on the students’usage of lexical chunks by randomly selecting 82 compositions from non-English sophomores in Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications as the sample. This study mainly tries to answer three questions:1) the relationship between students’writing scores and the number of lexical chunks they use in their writings; 2) the general characteristics of lexical chunks usage in high-score group and low-score group; 3) the features of lexical chunks learning attitudes and the usage of lexical chunks in the writings in high-score group and low-score group.The research results are shown as follows:1) The number of lexical chunks used in students’writings has a positive correlation with their writing scores.2) On average, the students in high-score group use more lexical chunks in their writings than those in low-group; as to the four categories of lexical chunks, phrasal constraints accounts for nearly 50% of all the lexical chunks in the writings of both groups; except institutionalized expressions, the number of other types of chunks used in high-score group has a significant difference from that of in low-score group; in students’ writings, the author finds that students sometimes use wrong form or inappropriate lexical chunks to express their opinions.3) Through the questionnaires, it is found that students show positive attitudes towards lexical chunks and recognize its importance to English learning; however, in actual writing, students, especially students in low-score group have some difficulties in using lexical chunks and are always reluctant to spend more time in reciting classical articles and practicing writings.At the end of this paper, the author of this paper proposes strategies of enhancing students’ chunks awareness from the aspects of vocabulary teaching, writing teaching and students, including introducing authentic language materials, corpus-assisting vocabulary teaching, contextual language teaching and guiding students to recite classical English articles, etc.