Effect Of Chunk Competence On Writing Of English Majors

Researchers and teachers have got interested in the study of lexical chunks in recent years, because it breaks through the traditional grammar-lexis dichotomy and combines"form"and"function". The most important theory about lexical chunks is"Language consists of grammaticalised lexis, not lexicalised grammar". In other words, the traditional teaching approach implies that the basic frame of language is grammar and the lexicion is filler. The disadvantage of this approach is that the learners have accumulated large amount of words, phrases and grammar, but they still may not use the language properly in certain situation. The communicative approach emphasizes the communicative function but it lacks the knowledge of grammar. The disadvantage of this approach is that it may bring the misuse of language. Lexical chunk study accommodates the form and function successfully and resolves the problems brought by the two teaching approaches. It provides the learners a comparatively ideal notion of foreign language teaching. This study discusses the effect of chunk competence on writing. Three questions are put forward in the study. The first is whether the learners who get high marks in English writing use more lexical chunks than those who get low marks. The second is whether the learners who get high marks in English writing use more kinds of lexical chunks than those who get low marks. And the last is whether lexical chunks contribute to the fluency and authenticity in English writing. The data in this study are collected by means of one questionnaire, an interview and one hundred compositions. They are a questionnaire about English learning and writing, an interview about chunk learning and the lexical chunks used in the compositions. Through the statistical analysis of the questionnaire and lexical chunks used in compositions by means of SPSS and the qualitative analysis of the interview, this study draws the following conclusions: 1) the learners who get high marks use more lexical chunks than those whose marks are low; 2) the learners who get high marks use more kinds of lexical chunks than those used by the learners who get low marks; 3) lexical chunks make the writing more fluent and idiomatic. They contribute a lot to the fluency and authenticity of the language. This study suggests in the end that lexical-chunk knowledge offers a new and more efficient way of learning English so that linguists and teachers should have a better understanding in this field and develop innovative ways of incorporating lexical chunks instruction into the language syllabus.