A Survey Of The Use Of The Lexical Chunks In Senior High School Students’ English Writing

Writing is one of the basic English language skills that senior high school students should master. It is also an important part in senior high school English teaching. Although the new English curriculum and college entrance examinations have strengthened the requirements of students’writing ability, and both teachers and students have spent much time and effort in writing, most students consider writing very difficult and there are a lot of problems existing in their writing, such as poor vocabulary, improper use and collocation errors, etc.Vocabulary, as one of elements that constitute language, is the foundation of language knowledge and skills, which is an important factor influencing students" writing level. In recent years, some linguists and researchers have raised interest in multi-words unit of language expressing an integrated meaning. These multi-words units, existing with a high frequency in language, and having the feature of grammar, semantic meaning and contexts, are stored and used as a whole and considered as ideal units for language processing and teaching, which are referred as lexical chunks by linguists such as Michael Lewis.Lexical chunks play an important role in language acquisition; they are beneficial for promoting students’language fluency, accuracy and idiomaticity, which provides a new perspective for improving students’ writing competence. Therefore, it is necessary to investigate into the use of lexical chunks. However, the researches on lexical chunks so far mainly focus on theory exploration and on college level, and few are conducted on senior high school students.In view of this situation, based on Nattinger&Decarrico’theory on lexical chunks, the author takes40compositions from the students in Grade Two in Xi’an Number85Middle School as writing samples, and divides them into the high-scoring group and low-scoring group. Adopting the approach of comparison and analysis, this thesis attempts to study the use of lexical chunks used in students’writing and aims to analyze the difference of frequency and classifications of lexical chunks used in the two groups, as well as the difference and the accuracy of lexical chunks when expressing the same function. After the analysis, the author makes some suggestion for English vocabulary and writing teaching.The conclusion of the research is that there are more lexical chunks used in high-scoring group, the frequency of lexical chunks used in high-scoring group is higher than that in low-scoring group, and the classification of the higher-scoring group is more than that of the low-scoring group. In the two groups, it is phrasal constraints that are used most frequently, followed by poly-words, sentence builders, and institutionalized expressions. And there also exists difference in the quality of lexical chunk use, when expressing the same meaning, the lexical chunks used in the high-scoring group is more various and accurate than that in the low-scoring groupThe author suggests that English teachers should have the lexical chunks awareness, and practice applying lexical chunks to English teaching in senior high schools, especially in vocabulary and writing teaching. For example, developing students’ awareness and ability of recognizing and applying lexical chunks; designing exercise on lexical chunks; and applying lexical chunks to writing teaching.