An Empirical Study Of Chinese English Majors' Acquisition Of Lexical Chunks

Linguistic studies in recent twenty years, especially the researches of corpus, show that there exist large numbers of fixed or semi-fixed word patterns in the natural language. Those prefabricated lexical chunks are used by the native speakers in their daily communication. As for the learners whose target language is English, a good mastery of those lexical chunks would improve their language learning. Therefore, lexical chunk is of great importance in the foreign language teaching.The studies of lexical chunk demonstrate a tendency from theoretical introduction to combination of theory and practical teaching, most of which are the empirical studies based on the corpus. The study on acquisition of specific types of lexical chunk is rare.This study is an empirical study of Chinese English majors'acquisition of lexical chunk. It aims to investigate the English majors'acquisition of four types of lexical chunk (polyword, collocation, institutionalized utterance, sentence frames) from receptive and productive mastery. The 270 subjects consist of freshman, sophomore and seniors from English Department of Sichuan International Studies University. They respectively present three levels of language proficiency, the low, intermediate and advanced. Students are tested through the lexical chunk multiple choices and translation to find out (1) What are the features of English majors'acquisition of four types of lexical chunk on the receptive mastery? (2) What are the features of English majors'acquisition of four types of lexical on the productive mastery? (3) How do English majors'acquisitions of four types of lexical chunk develop from receptive mastery to productive mastery? The major findings are obtained.(1) Except for collocation, the acquisitions of other three types of chunk are promoted with the improvement of language proficiency on the receptive mastery. As for the acquisition of collocation, subjects of low level perform better than that of the intermediate. Three groups'acquisition of institutionalized utterance is the poorest among four types of chunks.(2) Except for polywords, the acquisitions of other three types of chunk are promoted with the improvement of language proficiency on the productive mastery. With regard to the acquisition of polywords, the intermediate level is superior to the advanced. Three groups'acquisition of institutionalized utterance is still the poorest among four types of chunks.(3) Concerning three groups'acquisition of four types of lexical chunks, their receptive mastery is much better than productive one. Moreover, further discussion of common features of English majors'acquisition of lexical chunks will be given to gain a better understanding of lexical chunk acquisition.