| In recent years, linguists have discovered from the research on corpus that 90% of human natural language is made up of fixed or semi-fixed lexical chunks, which combine the characteristics of lexicon and grammar, help learners to achieve nativeness and appropriacy of expressions and facilitate the language production. Therefore, lexical chunks are regarded as the perfect units of lexicon study. However, researches on lexical chunks are limited to theoretical exploration and there are less experimental studies on the application of lexical chunks to writing among the Chinese learners. Consequently, based on the theory of Nattinger & De Carrico(2000), this dissertation adopts the method of quantitative research to investigate the English majors'use of lexical chunks in writing and analyze the questionnaire on the application of lexical chunks. The aim of this research is to explore the influnces of lexical chunks on promoting the level of writing and reveal the status quo of lexical chunks'employment by learners.The author randomly chose 120 sophomore students of English major from Qingdao University of Science & Technology, asking them to write an essay and complete a questionnaire. 40 essays of the high mark and 40 essays of the low mark were picked out respectively from 120 essays graded by three experienced teachers. The study investigate five questions as follows: (1) Is there any relevance between the number of lexical chunks and the level of writing? (2) Do more lexical chunks exist in high-mark essays than in low-mark essays and is the usage frequency of each type of lexical chunks the same?(3) Is there any relevance between the number of incorrect lexical chunks and the total number of lexical chunks? (4) What are the characteristics of the misapplication of lexical chunks? (5) Do the subjects have the habit and the awareness of the use of lexical chunks?According to the statistics of SPSS17.0 and the questionnaire analysis, this study finds that first, there is significant relevance between the number of lexical chunks applied in the essays and marks of the essays. The more appropriate lexical chunks learners applied, the higher mark learners got. Second, more lexical chunks were applied in high mark essays than in low mark essays but the usage frequency of each type of lexical chunks is different. The frequency from high to low is polywords, phrasal constraints, sentence builders and institutionalized expressions. Third, generally speaking, there is no significant correlation between the number of misapplied lexical chunks and the total number of lexical chunks. In the high-mark essays,there is no correlation between the number of misappled lexical chunks and the total number of lexical chunks, whereas there is significant correlation between two variables in the low-mark essays for they have not learned the lexical chunks well. Fourth, the characteristics of misapplied lexical chunks include the pragmatic mistakes, redundancy, syntatic rules'mistakes, confusion and blending. Fifth, not only do most of the subjects have the habit of accumulating the lexical chunks, but also apply them in writing consciously or unconsciously. There's no doubt that most of the subjects hold a positive attitude towards lexical chunks on promoting the writing level.Drawing on the above findings, the study presents the pedagogical implications as follows: on one hand, the students should change the tradional view of lexicon, bringing the lexical chunks into lexicon. They should shift the attention on the sound, form and meaning of an isolated word to lingusitic rules and a great number of lexical chunks. On the other hand, the teachers should improve the students'awareness of lexical chunks and train them to focus on lexical chunks by practice of identifying lexical chunks. The trainning can make students recognize invarible and variable part of lexical chunks and apply them creatively. In order to maintain the students'long-term memory of lexical chunks, it is essential for teachers to provide some learning activities and exercises for helping students consolidate the lexical chunks.
|
PDF Full Text Request