A Study Of Lexical Chunks In English Majors' Writing

For many years, there have been two extremes in the field of foreign language teaching. One is represented by structural approach, which puts emphasis on abstract rules of language competence while neglecting developing students' communicative ability. The other is communicative approach, which stresses teaching programs of imitating communication but turns a blind eye to the systematic study of language. In addition, in traditional lexis teaching, attention is paid to semantically motivated memorization of vocabulary. Students always try to memorize words by remembering their spellings and Chinese equivalents mechanically, but still feel difficult to use them in a context. In such a situation, a 'middle way' is needed to overcome the disadvantages of the above approaches.In recent years, with the development of computational linguistics, many researchers, through the computer-based analysis of data, have found that the communication in English is accomplished not only through words, phrases or sentences. About 70% of the natural English utterances are achieved by semi-fixed structures existing between words and fixed phrases (Altenberg: 1991). The semi-fixed structure is a kind of multiword phenomenon in natural language. In this thesis, 'lexical chunk' is adopted to describe this multiword phenomenon. Lexical chunk is in nature in the domain of communicative approach, for it emphasizes the communicative function of language. According to Lewis, lexical chunk is on a continuum between lexis and syntax, thus the combination of lexis and syntax. Therefore, the lexical-chunk-centered approach makes up for the shortcomings of structural approach and communicative approach.The present thesis introduces and discusses lexical chunks from various perspectives. Based mainly on Nattinger and DeCamco's classification of four types of lexical chunks, a research was carried out in this thesis to study the use of lexical chunks in a certain number of Chinese English majors' writing. First, 200 Chinese...