An Empirical Study On The Correlation Between Lexical Chunks And High School Students' English Writing Proficiency

With the development of cognitive research, researchers find that words are not the only unit in language processing; instead, there exist a large amount of lexical chunks that are ideal units in both language input and output. These lexical chunks are fixed or semi-fixed frames between traditional grammar and lexical items. They can be stored and easily retrieved as a whole from human memory without being subject to generation or analysis of language grammar. The wide existence of lexical chunks in language and its significance for language learning are drawing more and more attention from researchers in recent years.Most of the studies on lexical chunks remain on the level of theoretical discussion while leave many practical problems unexplored. Based on an empirical study, this thesis attempts to find out whether the application of lexical chunks into high school students'language learning and teaching can improve their English writing proficiency. The participants in the study were 120 students in Grade three from two naturally occurring classes of Pingdu No.1 Middle school of Shandong. They were randomly designated as the Control Group and the Experimental Group. In this three-month experiment, the students in the Control Group were taught in the traditional teaching method. Students relied on the bilingual word lists and rote learning to learn the new words. For the students in the Experimental Group, lexical chunks were applied into their classroom teaching and learning, which aims to help the students establish the concept of lexical chunks and make them use the lexical chunks consciously. Two writing test namely the pretest and the posttest, were given to the students during the experiment. The number of lexical chunks used and the composition scores of the two groups were counted and put into SPSS 16.0 respectively after the experiment for further analysis.The results of SPSS analysis reveal that the numbers of lexical chunks used by students are closely related to their composition scores. The students in both groups show no significant difference in the number of lexical chunks used as well as the composition scores at the beginning of the experiment which indicates they are almost at the same level in English study. However, after the experiment, the students in Experimental Group who have received the explicit and systematic instructions of lexical chunks achieve significant progress in both the number of lexical chunks and the composition scores, compared with their previous performance or the students in Control Group. While the performance of Control Group still remains at the same level as before. The results indicate that the more lexical chunks used in students'English writing, the higher scores they will get. A good master of lexical chunks can promote their language proficiency, fluency and idiomaticity in their learning process. The findings of the thesis suggest that lexical chunks play an important role in the second language acquisition. The use of lexical chunks in high school English teaching and learning indicates that lexical chunks are applicable and of great importance in improving the writing proficiency of high school students. The study also gives some pedagogical implications, such as helping students develop good learning strategies, consciously raising students'awareness of lexical chunks, teaching and learning lexical chunks in context, encouraging students to learn lexical chunks autonomously. Furthermore, the study also raises several issues for future study.Although there still exist some limitations in this study, such as a short period of experiment and a small amount of participants, it has yield some useful findings which are believed to have great implications for high school English teaching and learning in the future.