A Corpus-based Study On Lexical Chunks In College English Writing

Lexical chunks are a unity of forms, meanings and functions, and can reflect the relationship of the semantic meanings, grammar structures and pragmatic functions. By learning chunks, learners can improve their language competence in ease, fluency and appropriateness. So many researchers pay much attention to the chunks. There are mainly two types of studies in the field of chunks:theory-driven study and the corpus-driven study. Based on samples of the natural language using, the corpus-driven studies can enlarge the study field, which makes them have the superiority over the theory-driven studies. Lexical chunks play an important role in language learning and the research on the chunks of the learners'should be more essential. However, the recent studies mainly focus on the theories and seldom make empirical researches on the learner's language, especially the study of the written language of the learners.The present study makes a corpus-based study on the characteristics of chunks in Chinese college English writing. Firstly, the present study collects 500 compositions from Shanxi Normal University, and then uses these data to make the self-built corpus. With the help of the Antconc Tools, the 3-6-word chunks are chosen, and then under the procedure of manual filtering, the final useful chunks are selected. According to the number of total tokens and difficulty of the self-built corpus, some texts are chosen from the BNC (British National Corpus) to be the reference. By using the same methods,3-6-word chunks also be successfully chosen. According to Altenberg (1998), chunks are classified into three categories:full clauses, clause constituents and incomplete phrases and the function of these chunks also are discussed in this thesis. The result shows that chunks are prevalent in both Chinese college English writings and native English writings. In both corpora, the three-word chunks occupy the largest proportion, and the numbers of chunks declines as the chunk length increases. Clausal constituents come first in number, the incomplete phrase is the second, and the last is the incomplete clauses. Comparing with the native English people, Chinese college students use more chunks in their writings and the difference is more significant in longer chunks. Chinese learners overuse and underuse some chunks and have a colloquial tendency. As for the functions, in their writings, Chinese college students nearly can use all of the functions used by native English people in their writing. However, they tend to use simple and oral expressions. Chinese college students also tend to use the chunks which have equivalent meaning in both Chinese and English. Because of the above reasons their writing is nonnative and inappropriate.The research result suggests that it is not always true that the more chunks in a composition, the better the composition. The Chinese college students have a limited vocabulary and try to solve this problem by using the avoiding strategy and using simple expressions. They are easily affected by native language in the process of writing and cannot make a definite distinguish between the style of spoken English and written English. Based on these findings, the present study proposes some suggestions and hope they are useful for the future English teaching and learning in China.