A Survey On The Use Of Lexical Chunks In English Writing By Senior High School Students

Recently, with the development of the corpus linguistics, the role of lexical chunks in language acquisition arouses a strong interest among language teachers and researchers. Lexical chunk is"a sequence, continuous or discontinuous, of words or other elements, which is, or appears to be, prefabricated: that is, stored and retrieved whole from memory at the time of use, rather than being subject to generation or analysis by the language grammar."Lexical chunks, as"form-function composites", are believed to be the ideal units of language teaching and learning.Observations of the"semi-pre-constructed phrases", that is, lexical chunks in language, can be traced back to the mid-nineteenth-century. Different researchers use different and even overlapping terms to describe this phenomenon. Researchers at home and abroad have made lots of investigation into this phenomenon through different aspects. Recent second language acquisition research has demonstrated that lexical chunks are ubiquitous in both spoken and written discourse. The use of lexical chunks may help learners save effort in processing and communication and facilitate fluency and accuracy in both spoken and written language. Second language learners can be supposed to use lexical chunks as input for their analysis of the language, out of which they will derive grammatical and morphological rules.In the light of these important roles, it is essential to conduct research on lexical chunks. However, most of the present studies on lexical chunks still rest on the theoretical discussion and/or are involved with college or university students. As far as the research on English writing in senior high schools is concerned, so few studies on lexical chunks have been conducted. Therefore, the present study, mainly based on the theory of Nattinger & DeCarrico, compares and analyzes the lexical chunks used in 33 high-graded and 35 low-graded compositions and the corresponding questionnaires, attempting to investigate the use of lexical chunks in high school English writing and the underlying reasons.The results show that there are more lexical chunks in high-graded compositions than those in low-graded compositions. In both high-graded and low-graded compositions, the largest proportion of lexical chunks is phrasal constraints, sentence builders assume the second position, which is followed by polywords, and institutionalized expressions are used least. By means of T-test, we got the result that there are significantly more polywords, phrasal constraints and sentence builders in high-graded compositions than those in low-graded compositions, and there is insignificant difference in the number of institutionalized expressions between them. We also find that the learners'use of lexical chunks in English writing is far from satisfying. There exist so many nonstandard lexical chunks and lexical chunks wrongly used in a specific context. The results of the questionnaires reveal that most of the high school students pay attention to memorizing some useful lexical chunks and employ them in English writing. However, it is also found that the high school students do not attach enough importance to English writing and that nearly 30% of the subjects never or usually do not review the lexical chunks that have been learned and that about half of the subjects memorize lexical chunks isolated from context.