On The Relationship Between The Use Of Chunks And The Writing Proficiency Of English Learners

The purpose of the present paper is to explore the relationship between the use of chunks inwritings by Chinese learners of English and their English writing proficiency, aiming to answer thefollowing questions:1) Do Chinese learners of English hold positive attitudes toward chunks?2) Isthere any significant difference in the use of chunks between English Majors and Non-English Majors?3) What is the relationship between the use of chunks and learners’ writing proficiency?In order to answer the above questions, an investigation is conducted to one hundred juniors:50Non-English majors and50English majors. All the participants are required to complete aquestionnaire and a composition on a given topic. Then30compositions written by English majorsand30ones written by Non-English majors are randomly selected. Based on the classification ofchunks by Nattinger&DeCarrico (2000), the author analyzes each type of chunks that are correctlyused with the help of the Statistic Package of Social Science (SPSS).Through qualitative and quantitive analyses, the following conclusions are reached:1) thestudents’ answers to the questionnaire show that they generally take a positive attitude toward chunks,believing that learning chunks is helpful to their English study;2) Correlation has been found betweentheir strategies of chunks in real use and students’ beliefs about the use of chunks, showing that theirstrategies of chunks in real use and their attitudes react on each other;3) Among the four structuralcategories of chunks, there are significant differences in the use of phrasal constraints and sentencebuilders between the two groups’ English writings, as for poly-words and institutionalized expressions,there is no significant difference between them;4) Through correlation analysis, only the use ofphrasal constraints and sentence builders are found to correlate with the students’ writing scores, theuse of these two types of chunks can facilitate their written production and improve their Englishwriting ability more effectively.Based on the findings, the paper concludes that the correct use of chunks is important to writingto some extent; therefore, teachers should attach importance to chunks in pedagogical practice andhelp students improve the awareness of chunks.