A Corpus-based Study On The Influence Of Lexical Chunk Use On Non-English Majors’ English Writing

Although much attention has been paid to the improvement of students’writing skill in English teaching and learning, students still have great difficulty in improving their writing skills. For a majority of students, the biggest obstacle in writing is that they fail to figure out and use the appropriate words and phrases as quickly as possible (Yan Weihua2003).In recent years, an increasing number of scholars think the learning of lexical chunks is an effective way of helping students to improve their writing. Lexical chunks, as a unity of form, meaning and function, express the relationship of the grammatical structure, semantic meaning and pragmatic function. They are the basis of fluent language production, as, with lexical chunks, language production can directly occur without the process of analyzing their internal structures (Wood2001). By the learning of chunks, students make progress in their language competence in fluency, accuracy and appropriateness. Therefore, does the use of lexical chunks really have a positive influence on students’writing? Based on this question, three supporting questions are raised:1. What kinds of features do less advanced students have in their use of lexical chunks?2. What kinds of features do advanced students have in their use of lexical chunks?3. Do advanced students use more lexical chunks than less advanced students in their compositions?The present study is earried out from a corpus-based approach. Firstly,1000compositions are randomly chosen from CLEC. With9points as the dividing line,500compositions whose scores are above or equal to9scores are high-rated group, while the other500compositions whose scores are below9scores are low-rated group. In this way, high-rated group refers to advanced students while low-rated group refers to less-advanced students. Secondly, with the help of Antconc3.2.4. the3-6word chunks are selected in each group. Thirdly, as some of the selected word chunks are inaccurate, manual filtering is necessary so as to obtain the final useful chunks.The research result shows, for both advanced students and less advanced students, they use more3-word chunks than4-word chunks,5-word chunks and6-word chunks successively, which means the longer the lexical chunk is, the fewer students use. In addition, the result suggests advanced students use more lexical chunks than less advanced students in their compositions. Thus, it proves that the use of lexical chunks is positively related to students’language proficiency, which indicates the use of lexical chunks indeed has a positive influence on students’writing. Based on these findings, the present study attaches great importance to their implications on English teaching and learning and hopes the implications are useful for students to improve their writing skill.