An Experimental Research On The Improvement Of Students' Writing Competence Through The Cultivation Of Lexical Chunks Awareness

Writing in English is regarded as a weak point in college English teaching in China. Among the four basic skills of college English learning, writing is viewed as the hardest for learners to acquire, for it's a comprehensive reflection of the whole language study and application skills. In English teaching, both teachers and students have been devoting themselves more than ever to the English course. Unfortunately, the results prove unsatisfactory.With the rapid development of corpus linguistics, lexical chunks have attracted increasing attention in linguistics for their positive effect and role in language acquisition. The key principle of the lexical approach is that"language consists of grammatical zed lexis, not lexicalized grammar". The lexical chunk is just the subject studied of the lexical approach, simply speaking, the lexical chunk is the combination between the words, which is a kind of linguistic phenomenon of appearance existed in real-time communications with high- frequency and is larger than the words. Taking a relatively fixed form, it is a combination of syntax, semantics and context. That the lexical chunk is considered to be the unit of English vocabulary teaching follows the basic rule of the cognition, which will be a great help for the vocational students to improve greatly the accuracy, fluency and authenticity of the writing. Students can store the lexical chunks classifiably in the memory and retrieve them wholly as needed which will reduce greatly the time from understanding to producing language information. The proposal of lexical chunks based method finds the new ideas and perspectives for the improvement of English writing proficiency.In spite of full awareness of experts and teachers on the lexical chunks in both China and abroad, they have been more devoted to the theoretical study rather than experimental research, the subjects are mostly undergraduates. This paper, based on the lexical approach, explores through the experimental study whether raising vocational students'lexical chunks awareness can help them overcome the weakness in writing. This paper is divided into five chapters. Chapter one is introduction. This chapter briefly describe the background, significance and purpose of the research.Chapter two expounds literature review, which includes the introduction of the lexical chunks'definition, classification, characters and roles as well as the researching situation of lexical chunks at home and abroad, also summarize the current situation of vocational students'English writing competence. Chapter three is the research design. In this chapter, the purpose, subjects, instruments employed as well as procedures are introduced in detail. Chapter four is the statistics analysis and discussions on the experimental results. Chapter five is conclusion of the research. This chapter sums up the major findings of the research and proposes the teaching suggestions and the limitations of the study.