A Comparative Study Of Lexical Chunks In English Writing Of English Majors And Non-English Majors

In recent years the lexical chunks have gradually come into people’s vision and become a hot topic in the research field of second language. The lexical chunks are fixed or semi-fixed structure that lies between vocabulary and syntax. They can be stored and extracted as a whole. Because of this feature, lexical chunks have become the best language unit of inputting and outputting. In domestic researches there are two kinds of researches about lexical chunks. The first one only concentrates on one certain kind of learners, for example the study of lexical chunks in English writing at senior high school. The second research is the comparative study on the lexical chunks used in second language learners’and native learners’writings. But there are relatively few comparative studies on different kinds of learners at home.This study is conforming to the development trend of lexical chunks. Thus this study focuses on the comparative study on lexical chunks used in English majors’ and non-English majors ’writings. According to Altenberg’s(1998) classification system, the author collect English majors’ and non-English majors’ writing samples to analyze their lexical chunks. The following two questions are the main discussing points:1) What are the proportion distributions of three categories of lexical chunks in the English majors’ and non-English majors’ writing? Is there any difference between them?2) Do English major students and non-English ones have differences in the pragmatic characteristics of the lexical chunks used in their writings under the same pragmatic function? Please point out the differences.In order to answer the first question, the author screens out the number and occurrence frequency of three categories of lexical chunk by manual filtering and then make a comparison between the number and occurrence frequency of three categories of lexical chunk used by English majors and non-English majors. The Chi-Square test is employed to conduct whether there exist significant differences of the number and occurrence frequency of three categories of lexical chunk used by English majors and non-English majors. In order to answer the second question, the author sorts out the pragmatic functions of each kind of lexical chunks according to Altenberg’ theory and then to find out if there exist differences in the pragmatic characteristics of the lexical chunks used in their writings under the same pragmatic function. The research finds are as following:1) Three categories of lexical chunks have appeared in both English majors’ and non-English majors’writing samples. Among them the clause constituents accounted for the largest proportion; the incomplete phrases ranked the second place; the full clauses have the fewest proportion. The result indicates that the distribution trend is same as Altenberg’s and Wei Naixing’s research.2) Through the Chi-Square test and Z-Test it proves that there is no obvious difference between English majors’ and non-English majors’ writing samples except the multiple clause constituent in terms of the number of three categories of lexical chunks. But there are obvious differences in terms of the occurrence frequency of three categories of lexical chunks. The result indicates that non-English majors overuse some lexical chunks.3) Through the comparative study of pragmatic characteristics under the same pragmatic function,we find that though there is no obvious difference in terms of the number of the lexical, the pragmatic characteristics of non-English majors is not so satisfactory. Compared with English majors, non-English majors tend to be simple, single and colloquial on the use of lexical chunks. And also some lexical chunks are overused or underused. The reasons may be that non-English majors are more easily affected by the mother tongue or lack of cultural awareness. As a conclusion, the author points out some suggestions on teaching and learning and the limitations of the study.