The Anylysis And Study On The Use Of Lexical Chunks In College English Writing

Writing is an important component of four basic skills in language acquisition, which also acquires the greatest requirements and difficulties. It requires learners to creatively express their internalized knowledge on the basis of mastering certain vocabularies. However, the writing scores of most college students are unsatisfactory, they are generally lack of vocabularies, or even if they have a great number of basic vocabularies and have a very good understanding of grammatical rules, with the low ability of writing organization, their language expression is usually poor in accuracy, fluency and idiomaticity. Recently more and more scholars have fixed their eyes on lexical chunks in order to solve this difficult problem.Based on Nattinger and DeCarrico’s classification of four categories of lexical chunks(poly-words; institutionalized expressions; phrasal constraints; sentence builders), the thesis studies compositions written by119non-English majors who come from the Northeast Forestry University and the genres include an argumentative writing and a practical writing which often appear in CET-4. According to their scores, high-score compositions and low-score compositions were chosen as the materials of analyzing, then the Statistic Package of Social Science (SPSS) was employed to analyze the data. First, the frequency was calculated of each type of lexical chunks in high-score or low-score compositions; and then the distribution of four categories of lexical chunks was compared in high-score and low-score compositions; after that T-test was used to compare the differences of the same type of lexical chunks used between high-score and low-score compositions; next, Pearson correlation coefficient was used to find out the relationship between each category of lexical chunks and high-score compositions. Finally, the typical errors in low-score compositions were carefully analyzed.The results show that1) there are more lexical chunks in high-score compositions than low-score compositions in both two genres of writing, so does the frequency;2) in the argumentative writing, the frequency of sentence builders is the highest; but the frequency of phrasal constraints takes the highest place in practical writing;3) in these both two genres of writing, there is a significant difference in applying poly-words, phrasal constraints and sentence builders between high-score compositions and low-score compositions;4) in the argumentative writing, sentence builders contribute most to the scores of writing; while phrasal constraints contribute most to the scores of the practical writing;5) the reasons of low-score compositions include two aspects, the words used are not accurate and idiomatic and most of the texts are not well organized and coherent.It is hoped that the study of this thesis can make teachers draw the attention of lexical chunks, with which they can modify the traditional way of teaching and help students build up their awareness of lexical chunks. Meanwhile, learners should study different chunks with different aims; improve their abilitiess of autonomous learning; make great efforts to finish each genre of writing; develop their English ability in an all-round way.