A Study On Chinese College Students' Use Of Lexical Chunks And Quality Of Their English Writing

The study on lexical chunks has been a major concern of many linguists and foreign language instructors in recent years. A lexical chunk,"as a form/function composite", expresses the interplay of semantics, syntax and pragmatics. Lexical chunks help learners achieve appropriateness of expressions, and facilitate the language production. With lexical chunks as the core and the cognitive linguistics as the theoretical foundation, the lexical approach is a kind of compromise between the structural approach and the communicative approach. It not only puts much emphasis on grammar, but also attaches great importance to the appropriate usage of the lexis in specific contexts. The most important principle of the lexical approach is"language consists of grammaticalised lexis—not lexicalised grammar".In China, English writing is an obligatory course in colleges and universities. The result of traditional teaching is that students can't produce a good composition after learning a large number of words and phrases and the methods of composing structure. The students'words and sentences aren't accordant with English usage and they aren't able to use proper words and phrases according to different situations. This phenomenon is very common in college English writing.In light of the important roles of lexical chunks, it is essential to conduct a research on them. However, most of the previous studies on lexical chunks still rest on theoretical discussions and few empirical studies have been conducted to explore the development of lexical chunks in Chinese learners of English. As for the study of lexical chunks in writing, it still remains a relative novelty.The present study is based on the theory of Nattinger and DeCarrico and devoted to investigating whether the learning of lexical chunks is correlated with the improvement of Chinese college students'EFL writing. And an experiment was conducted in two classes. One class was the experimental group (EG) taught in the lexical approach and the other was the control group (CG) taught in the traditional method. The main teaching difference of the two groups was that the concept of lexical chunks and some information relevant to lexical chunks were not introduced to the students of CG. The experiment lasted for 12 weeks and each student was asked to write 3 compositions respectively in accord with CET4 writing standards in the process of the experiment. By comparing the composition scores and the number of lexical chunks used in compositions of EG and CG, the conclusions have been drawn that lexical approach has a positive effect on the college students'English writing and the number of lexical chunks in the students'compositions has increased significantly. In addition, a questionnaire survey has been carried out among the students of EG after the students'final examination. According to their answers to the questionnaire, the author finds out that the overwhelming majority of students from EG have accepted the lexical approach and have realized the important roles that lexical chunks play in improving their English writing.The major findings of the study demonstrate the positive effects of lexical chunks on the improvement of the college students'EFL writing. Finally, pedagogical implications are put forward and limitations are also pointed out for teaching practice and future researches.