The Correlation Between Prefabricated Chunks And College English Writing

In recent years, many linguists and teachers are becoming increasingly aware of the importance of prefabricated chunks in language teaching and learning. "The concept has implications which, if taken seriously, could revolutionize our views of language use, acquisition, and pedagogy, and possibly even human cognitive architecture", as Cobb has put it in 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.Prefabricated chunks are the language units which exist with high frequency in language. They are composites of grammar, semantics and pragmatics. They play a vital role in everyday communication, contributing to the ease, fluency and appropriateness in listening, speaking, reading and writing. As far as the present thesis is concerned, the ability to use prefabricated lexical chunks allows greater fluency and idiomaticity in writing for learners of English as a second language. Teaching prefabricated chunks is a new language pedagogical theory, and it is based mainly on the rationale that language consists of grammaticalised lexis-not lexicalized grammar. In other words, language consists not of traditional grammar and vocabulary but often of multi-word prefabricated chunks.This thesis aims to find out whether the ability of using prefabricated chunks is closely correlated with the writing performances of non-English majors. The thesis is presented in four chapters.Chapter one serves as an introduction. It explains why the topic is chosen as the research focus.Chapter two expounds literature review, including an overview of prefabricated chunks in language teaching and learning, the definition and criteria of prefabricated chunks, functions of prefabricated chunks in written discourse and the psychological reality of their existence.Chapter three is mainly about the introduction of the research methodology, including the objectives, subjects and the instruments employed as well as the procedure of the experiment.The fourth chapter presents the research results. The author compares the performances in writing between the experimental and control group respectively with the help of SPSS software, aiming to show that the ability of using prefabricated chunks is closely correlated with students' performance in writing.From the analysis and discussions of the previous parts, the author sums up the study and its implications on college English writing in the last part of this thesis. The last chapter also includes the limitations of the present study and suggestions for further studies.