The Study Of Lexical Chunks In English Writing At Senior High School

In recent years, work in Sociolinguistics and Applied Linguistics has led to considerable interest in the importance of multi-word chunks of language expressing an integrated meaning. Nattinger&DeCarrico (2000) called this kind of multi-word chunks'lexical phrases'.This thesis, on the basis of the analysis of the present English writing state in senior high school, mainly based on the theory of chunks by Nattinger&DeCarrico (2000), makes a contrastive analysis of lexical chunks in the 30 compositions at senior high school level, which are divided into the high-graded and the low-graded groups and aims to explore the differences of frequencies and categories of lexical chunks used in the two groups'compositions. Besides, relying on the contrastive analysis, this thesis also explore what are the differences of lexical chunks if expressing the same function and the different proficiencies in using lexical chunks in the two groups. At last, the author gives some advice on English teaching in senior high school. According to the analysis, we find that the frequency of lexical chunks in the high-graded group is much higher than the low-graded group and the high-graded group can use more categories of lexical chunks. What's more, the lexical chunks used in the high-graded group are more accurate. Instead, the students in another group make some mistakes in using lexical chunks. Finally, both the students in high-graded group and low-graded group rely on the basic and simple lexical chunks and the latter much more.According to the above analysis, the author suggests the introduction of lexical chunks-based approach into English teaching, especially English writing class in senior high school. For example, the teachers should help the students cultivate the abilities to know and distinguish lexical chunks, learn lexical chunks in context, and increase the productive practice of lexical chunks to cultivate the students'generative abilities to lexical chunks. For some reasons, there are some limitations in this thesis and it is hoped that this thesis can just provide some simple foundations for the future study.