A Study On The Role Of Lexical Chunks In College English Writing And Its Pedagogical Implication

English is becoming more and more important as an instrument of international communication. In China much attention has been paid to English pedagogy in order to improve English learners', especially college students' English proficiency. Though many approaches have been used to teach English, the effect is far from satisfactory. Approaches that rely too heavily on achievement of rules of grammar often lead to dissociation from any consideration of appropriateness, and approaches that rely too heavily on an ability to use language appropriately can lead to a lack of necessary grammatical knowledge and of the ability to compose or decompose sentences with reference to it. Just as Widdowson(1989:131) indicates "the structural approach accounts for one aspect of competence by concentrating on analysis but does so at the expense of access. Whereas the communicative approach concentrates on access to the relative neglect of analysis".The lexical approach is a new language pedagogical theory, the most important of which is "language consists of grammaticalised lexis—not lexicalised grammar". It can be summarized in a few words: language consists not of traditional grammar and vocabulary but often of multi-word prefabricated chunks. In particular, lexical chunks were seen as a productive resource for learners, aiding in the production, comprehension, and necessary analytical reflection on the forms and meanings of the target language. Teachers using the Lexical Approach will not analyze the target language in the classroom, but will be more inclined to concentrate learners' attention upon these chunks.Lexical chunks are the language units which exist with high frequency in language. They are composites of grammar, semantics and pragmatics. They play a vital part in everyday communication, contributing to the ease, fluency and appropriateness in listening, speaking, reading and writing. The ability to use preformed lexical chunks allows greater fluency in speech production. The use of lexical chunks can aid the listener as well. Because lexical chunks can be recognizedas individual wholes. This spares the listener some of the processing effort required to interpret an utterance word-by-word. Lexical chunks also play a part in vocabulary and grammar acquisition. Once a chunk is known , it can be analyzed and segmented into its constituent words. The entire lexical chunk may be analyzed into separate words, although it may continue to be stored as a whole because of its utility. Because this segmentation also involves syntax, it has been suggested that it can lead to grammatical acquisition.Corpus research is making it clear that the patterning resulting from lexical chunks is a major component of language. As such, lexical chunks are likely to become an increasingly important topic in Applied Linguistic circles, simply because lexical chunks are a key element in how language is used. In light of their essential nature, we need to come to a better understanding of their behavior and develop innovative ways of incorporating lexical chunks instruction into the language syllabus.In recent years, FL experts and teachers are becoming more and more aware of the importance of lexical chunks in language teaching and learning. The work of Sinclair, Nattinger, DeCarrico, and Lewis represents a significant theoretical and pedagogical shift from the past. First, their claims have revived an interest in a central role for accurate language description. Second, they challenge a traditional view of word boundaries, emphasizing the language learner's need to perceive and use patterns of lexis and collocation. Most significant is the underlying claim that language production is not a syntactic rule-governed process but is instead the retrieval of larger phrasal units from memory.This thesis explores the role of lexical chunks in college English writing and its pedagogical implication in English teaching and learning. The thesis is presented in four chapters. Chapter one presents a literature review in this study, which begins with an overview of lexical chunks in language teaching and learning, and then comes to the study of lexical chunks in various aspects including the definition of lexical chunks, the criteria to define lexical chunks, the categories of lexical chunks, and the criteria to categorize lexical chunks, followed by the role of lexical chunks inlanguage teaching and learning. Chapter two concerns the research methodology. The objectives, subjects and the instrument employed are introduced as well as the procedure of the investigation. Chapter three analyses and discusses the result of the investigation and indicates the limitation of the investigation. The fourth chapter follows the analysis and discussion of the previous part to sump up the implications of the present investigation to college English writing and to language teaching and learning. Finally it comes to the conclusion.