A Study On Chinese Students' Use Of Fabricated Chunks In English Writing

Prefabricated chunks are a multi-lexical meaning unit combining the features of both lexicology and grammar, with functional and contextual associations. With the development of corpus linguistics, their importance in SLA is highlighted.In view of chunk's vital role in language development, it is of great value to undertake studies on language learners' grasp of chunks. This research aims to explore how well Chinese students at different English learning stages learn chunks; whether chunks functioning as discourse devices can differentiate high score compositions from low score ones; what relationships there are between chunk use and writing scores.Methodologically, this research is done on the basis of psycholinguistic theory and with the aid of data from two corpora. Primarily, since the concept of prefabricated chunk is advanced from the perspective of language users, the researcher identifies and selects a certain number of high frequency chunks out of 30,000-word texts sampled from Sub-CLEC (ST2, ST4 and ST6). Then, to discover the chunk use features of non-native speakers, a comparison is made between the three sub-corpora in the frequencies of the high frequency chunks. Data from BROWN are used for reference.The results reveal that the elevation of Chinese students' English learning stage was coupled with the increase of the use of chunks. However, some of the high frequency chunks used by native speakers were overused, but far more of them were underused. Furthermore, chunk use seems to be most correlated with and have the greatest prediction power to students' writing results, while other variables, such as token, type, grammatical knowledge etc, are less correlated.The findings would be insightful for several aspects. Firstly, due to their ready-made property, prefabricated chunks can substantially enhance language learners' writing fluency. Secondly, chunks can enable language learners to use English more appropriately for their pragmatic function. Finally, since many students conspicuously lack the knowledge of chunks, it is advisable for teachers to lay emphasis on chunks.