A Study Of The Developmental Features In The Use Of Lexical Chunks In English Majors' Writing

The study is an exploration of the developmental features of the use of lexical chunks in English majors' writing. Lexical chunks, "as form/function composites", reflect the interaction of semantics, syntax and pragmatics. Lexical chunks support the development of syntactic rules, help learners to achieve native-likeness and appropriacy of expressions, and also facilitate the language production. Therefore, it is of great value to undertake studies of language learners' grasp of lexical chunks. However, there are far from adquate empirical studies to show the development of lexical chunks used by Chinese learners of English. The present study is aimed at testing two hypotheses: 1) As students of English majors move to a higher grade, there are significant differences among their use of the four types of lexical chunks, that is, polywords, institutionalized expressions, phrasal constraints and sentence builders. 2) The use of lexical chunks is correlated with writing quality.To test the hypotheses, the researcher collected 120 essays on the topic of "The Function of University" from four classes of four grades. The students were all English majors from the School of Foreign Languages and Literature in Shandong University. The students were required to write at least 250 words. And the scale was borrowed from the IELTS writing criteria in Task 2. Then the researcher counted the number of each type of lexical chunks and the total words of each essay. In order to ensure accuracy, the counting was repeated three times. After that, the statistics and the scores were typed into SPSS 16.0 for analysis.Results show that students in Grade 4 can write longer essays than those of the other three grades. Students in Grade 2 follow those in Grade 4 in the average length of essays, while students in Grade 1 and Grade 3, produce similar length in their essays. As for the number of lexical chunks used in essays, students in Grade 2 use most, followed by Grade 3, Grade 4 and Grade 1. As to the use of each type of lexical chunks, Grade 2 uses most phrasal constraints and sentence builders, and Grade 3 comes in second. Grade 4 uses the least phrasal constraints and Grade 1 employs the least sentence builders. In the use of polywords, Grade 4 uses the most, and then Grade 1; Grade 3 takes the third place, followed by Grade 2. For the use of institutionalized expressions used by the four grades, Grade 1 and Grade 4 use the same quantity, followed by Grade 3, while Grade 2 uses the least number.One-way ANOVA analysis shows that differences exist among the four grades in the use of sentence builders. It shows that Grade 1 and Grade 2 have extremely significant differences in the use of sentence builders. Moreover, Grade 1 and Grade 3 have very significant differences using sentence builders, suggesting that after a couple of years' learning in the college, students in Grade 2 and Grade 3 have made great progress in the use of sentence builders.Meanwhile, correlation has been found between the use of phrasal constraints and writing score, that is, the more phrasal constraints one uses in his writing, the higher his score will be. The use of other three types of lexical chunks—polywords, institutionalized expressions and sentence builders does not have correlation with writing score.According to the findings, the use of lexical chunks is very important to writing; therefore, it is hoped that the present study of the developmental features in the use of lexical chunks in English majors' writing can draw teachers' attention to lexical chunks in teaching practice and help students improve the awareness of lexical chunks.