A Study Of The Effects Of Lexical Chunks Input On The IELTS Writing

Numerous fixed or semi-fixed multi-words or sentences, i.e. Lexical Chunks have been found frequently occurred in the corpus and computer analysis of the English language as language units stored in human's brains and acquired as whole in the process of language acquisition, the key principle of which is that"language consists of grammaticalised lexis instead of lexicalised grammar", that is, language consists not of traditional grammar and vocabulary but often of multi-word lexical chunks. As a composite of language form and function, lexical chunk reflects the positive interaction of syntactic, syntax and pragmatics, in turn, promote further the generation and development of syntactic in-built rules in the process of language acquisition.It complies with the cognitive law to teach English vocabulary by regarding lexical chunk as a unit in teaching English writing, i.e."Lexical Approach"which has the advantages that can not be achieved by other English pedagogies, in which the fixed or semi-fixed multi-words or sentences may be treated as ready-made units in the language communications rather than"language segments", as once learnt and stored by the learners, they can be recalled and retrieved easily (Nattinger & DeCarrico, 1992). The fact that the formulaic chunks helps learners facilitate the language production and ease the burden of the language processing and shorten the gap between the language formation and output of the exact target language in the mind to achieve language fluency, authenticity, exactness and learning efficiency and thus arouse an ever-increasing concern and interest of many linguists and foreign language instructors in recent years.In retrospect of the history of Second Language Acquisition study and research, language input has been a hot topic and received much attention from many scholars. In 1980s, American linguistic Krashen put forward the"Input Hypothesis"which claims that"humans acquire language in only one way----by understanding messages or by receiving comprehensible input"(Krashen, 1985), in which Krashen terms the learner's current level"i", and the level that the learner will get to next,"i +1"and he insists that we acquired language by understanding input that is only slightly beyond our current level of acquired competence and that for a teacher great attention should be paid on the input of both"i"and"1"in the teaching process. According to Krashen's"Input Hypothesis", the understanding of the input"1"promotes the learners'language acquisition, therefore, the most important thing is to make it possible for the learners to be exposed to as much comprehensible input as possible.Though a host of researches on lexical chunks, language input and language output, such as English writing, have been conducted respectively, rare research on the relationship of the above three theories has been done before. Based mainly on the theories of Nattinger and DeCarrico (1992, 2000), Lewis(1997,2000) and Krashen (1985), the author here proposes and explores the effect of lexical chunks input on the Chinese learners'English writing by contrastive analyses of the experiment data. Hence three research questions are formulated as follows in this thesis based on the comparison between the traditional teaching method and the lexical approach in writing:(1) What relationship between the input of lexical chunks and the quality of the learners'IELTS writing?(2) What correlation between the number of lexical chunks used by the learners and the quality of their IELTS writing?(3) What the effects of input on the learners'mastering of lexical chunks?Experiment, lasting for about 8 weeks (from October 15 to December 15, 2008), was carried out for those purposes in the author's IELTS writing class, in which the students would take IELTS examinations and the participants of which are 60 students chosen after the pre-tests with their scores almost at the same level and at the ages from 16 to 18. The author divided them randomly into two groups, one appointed as the Experimental Group consisting of 21 female and 9 male students and the other as the Control Group including 22 female and 8 male students. The two groups used the same text books and have the same classes every week while the difference is that only the Experimental Group is given the instructions, various interesting activities and exercises related to lexical chunks aiming at aiding the participants to establish the concept of chunks and making them use lexical chunks consciously and the Control Group is taught in the traditional teaching method, i.e., students mainly learn discrete words by means of bilingual word lists and rote learning. After 8 weeks, four exams of the same paper were carried out in the two groups at the end of the experiment and statistic analyses of the four tests'results are made in terms of the scores and number of lexical chunks, from which it can be found that the scores of Experimental Group has greatly improved much more than that of the Control Group. Of course, there are many factors that affect the writing such as individual writing ideas, the acquired knowledge and the writing skills except for the language materials. However, the author mainly discussed the language accuracy, fluency, appropriacy, coherence and completeness influenced by the input of lexical chunks.The experiment verifies the necessity of input of lexical chunks in English writing teaching course, which can help the students improve their language accuracy, validity and promote the learners'language competence so as to get a higher score.Although some limitations still exist in this study, such as the short period and only a small number of participants, who have special learning purpose, it has yielded some useful findings which are believed to have great implications for later foreign language learning and teaching.