A Study On The Use Of Lexical Chunks In English Writing Of Junior High School Students And Corresponding Countermeasures

Writing is one of the basic language skills that junior high school students should be capable of,which can objectively reflect the language ability of learners.It also plays an important role in junior high school English teaching.The acquisition of lexical chunks facilitates the learners to overcome the negative effect of their mother tongue to some extent,to develop comprehensive linguistic competence and enhance the accuracy and fluency of writing.Based on Nattinger and DeCarrico's lexical chunks classification theory,79 grade four students from Yantai No.10 Middle School were selected as research subjects.Through the analysis of their writing samples,this thesis studies the use of lexical chunks in junior high school students' English writing.The questions to be studied in this thesis are:(1)What is the overall situation of the use of lexical chunks in English writing of junior high school students?(2)Is there any difference between high-score and low-score compositions in the use of four types of lexical chunks?(3)What are the types and causes of the lexical chunks errors in English writing of junior high school students?The conclusions reached are as follows:Junior high school students can generally use a certain number of lexical chunks in their writings.However,these lexical chunks mainly remain at the lexical level,but not syntactic level.From the point of view of the distribution of lexical chunks used,the largest proportion is the phrasal constraints,followed by the polywords,then the sentence builders and the institutionalized expressions.Through the comparative analysis of the use of the lexical chunks in the high-score and low-score group compositions,it is found that the number and frequency of the lexical chunks used by the high-score group students are much higher than those in low-score group.In terms of the use of sentence builders,there is no significant difference between the two groups.However,there are significant differences betweenthe two groups in the use of the other types of lexical chunks.The number and type of the lexical chunks that express personal opinion and work as logical connector in high-score compositions are much abundant than that in low-score ones.There are different degrees of error in both high-score and low-score compositions.It is clear that there are more errors in the low-score groups.The types of chunk errors mainly include word-spelling errors and non-standard lexical chunks which are caused by carelessness and inadequate learning.