An Empirical Study On The Application Of Chunks To The Teaching Of EFL Writing In College

With the rapid increase of international exchanges, English, as one of the international languages, is becoming more and more important. In China, English teaching aimed at cultivating learners'comprehensive English ability has long been catching the attention of the educational circle and language researchers. In the EFL teaching in China, there are four basic skills that English learners need to acquire. They are listening, speaking, reading, and writing, among which English writing is the most difficult and demanding. Although Chinese EFL learners studying at universities and colleges have accumulated a certain amount of knowledge of English grammar and a relatively large English vocabulary, yet recent studies find that there still exist many problems in their English writings.With the development of corpus linguistics, language experts and researchers find, through lots of statistical researches, that large numbers of prefabricated chunks serving as memory units are stored in language users'brains. Lexical chunks of this kind play a significant part in language acquisition and language output. Established and developed on the basis of lexical chunks, the teaching method based on the lexical approach, combining the features of the structural approach and those of the communicative approach, is indeed an effective teaching method which takes both grammatical structures and language contexts into consideration in the process of teaching. But in recent years, although much attention has been paid to the study of lexical chunks, most language experts and researchers, however, concentrate on theoretical discussions of the application of lexical chunks in English teaching or focus on statistical researches on the use of lexical chunks of EFL learners in our country and there has been very limited empirical research on the practical application of lexical chunks to classroom teaching.This thesis schemes out a teaching method which concentrates on the central role of language learners, with the aim of cultivating language learners'output competence by combing the constructivist theory with the teaching mode of the lexical approach, and this method has been applied to the practical teaching of college EFL writing. In this research, 135 non-English major sophomores of Information Engineering University were chosen as the subjects of the teaching experiment. These participants were from two natural classes, one of which was randomly taken as the experimental class and the other as the control class. This empirical study lasted for an entire term, during which the constructivist teaching method with emphasis on the teaching of lexical chunks was adopted in the experimental class while the control class continued to use the previous teaching method. Before the teaching experiment was performed, a questionnaire survey was carried out among all the participants from both the experimental class and the control class in order to find out participants'deficiencies in EFL learning as well as the strategies they tend to use in their English writing. Meanwhile, all the participants were asked to write an English composition as a pre-test of the teaching experiment, so that a general picture of the participants'EFL writing abilities could be obtained. At the end of the term, a post-test of writing was given to the participants in both classes. All the participants'compositions of the two tests were collected and analyzed by the statistical software SPSS 13.0. Their composition scores as well as the chunks that the participants used in their compositions were carefully studied through statistical analysis. The statistical results show that at the end of the term, participants from both classes made improvements in their EFL writing competence. But the students from the experimental class improved more dramatically than the students from the control class. Meanwhile, the author also made some analysis on how the participants used chunks in the two writing tests as well as in their ordinary writing exercises, summarized the causes of the misusages of lexical chunks, and put forward some suggestions. Through this empirical study, the following conclusions have been reached:1. The chunk-based teaching method can be effectively applied to practical EFL classroom teaching.2. For Chinese college EFL learners, the chunk-based teaching method can significantly improve the accuracy and fluency of their English writing as well as their ability to organize a discourse.3. The ability to use lexical chunks varies greatly among different learners at different English levels. The chunk-based teaching method has proved to be more helpful to lower level English learners.4. When EFL learners are learning and using lexical chunks, their mother tongue may have some negative transfer effect on these processes.Finally, the author discusses the advantages of applying lexical chunks to college EFL teaching, and summarizes some pedagogical implications of the application of the chunk based method in the teaching of EFL writing. At the same time, the author also offers some reflections on the limitations and problems existing in this empirical study and points out the future direction for further research.