Lexical Phrases In EFL Writing

Vocabulary has been traditionally thought of as individual words. In recent years, however, with the wide use of computers, in the research of lexicon, many researchers, through analysis of the data in computers, have found that the communication in English is not completed only through words, phrases or sentences. The semi-fixed units that are larger than individual orthographic words complete most natural utterances. These units combining the features of lexicon and syntax are called lexical phrases.It is already more than 20 years since the "lexical phrases" burst onto the applied linguistics stage. "The concept has implications which, if taken seriously, could revolutionize our views of language use, acquisition, and pedagogy, and possibly even human cognitive architecture." (Cobb, 2002) The ever-increasing awareness of the pervasiveness of prefabricated chunks in native-speaker performance must lead us to rethink our approach to teaching English as a foreign language to Chinese college students.The lexical approach, whose fundamental principle is "language consists of grammaticalized lexis, not lexicalized grammar", was first coined by Lewis and his associates. It is based on the idea that an important part of language acquisition is the ability to comprehend and produce lexical phrases as unanalyzed wholes, or "chunks" and that these chunks become the raw data by which learners perceive patterns of language traditionally thought of as grammar.