A Probe Into The Effect Of Lexical Chunk Input On English Writing Competence

Writing plays a very important part in foreign language learning. Writing performance can indicate learners’comprehensive language proficiency. However, writing has always been a challenge for most Chinese students when they learn English. There often appears some expressions in Chinglish, which are wrong in grammar, and not idiomatic or don’t agree with the habitual expression of the native in vocational college students’compositions. As we know, the traditional grammar approach emphasizes the grammar and ignores the language communicative function. That teaching approach whose center is grammar implies that language is a dichotomy of grammar or lexicon, that is, the basic frame is grammar, and the lexicon is the filler. The disadvantage of this approach is lack of "accuracy", for after learners have accumulated a lot of grammar rules, words and phrases, they still may not use proper utterances in a certain situation appropriately. The communicative approach emphasizes the communicative function and it is lack of the knowledge of grammar which is related to making correct sentences. In this situation, we recognize that we need a "middle" way to overcome the disadvantages of the above two approaches. In order to improve the situation, this paper draws attention to lexical chunks in the English teaching.Lexical chunks are the unity of grammatical rules, semantic meanings and pragmatic contexts. Because lexical chunks are larger linguistic units and appear in the real communication very frequently and more fixed in structures, they have a merit of retrieving as wholes and need not to be grammatical generation and analysis. A large number of psycholinguistic studies have proved that the native speakers store numerous chunks available in their brains. They have found that language is mainly composed of lexical chunks and lexical chunks are the center of the language structures. And the accumulation of lexical chunks helps to make lexical retrieval more accurate, fluent and idiomatic so that they can improve students’writing proficiency. Therefore, it is believed that lexical chunks fills a crucial role in language learning and lexical chunk approach can be applied to language teaching. The author will do an experiment on some of the non-English major students in Hunan International Business Vocational College. And this experiment will last16weeks/The classes will be held Jour lessoas a week. The thesis is to apply the lexical chunk approach to intensive reading class, in order to find out whether the lexical chunk approach can really improve students’English writing marks and improve the learner’s writing ability. The author will use the chunk theory in the experimental class, and use traditional methods in the control class. The thesis falls into four chapters. Chapter One is an introduction which describes the background, significance of the study, requirements and current situation of English writing in China, etc. Chapter Two is a definition of lexical chunks and holistic historical review of writing. Chapter Three is about research methodology, including experimental design, the background of students, methods, procedures of the study, data collection. Chapter Four is about results and discussion. And in this chapter the author will use EXCEL and SPSS16.0to analyze and discuss the collected data in this chapter. The last section leads to a conclusion of the study, summarizing the major findings of the study and discussing the advantages and limitations of lexical phrases used in writing teaching. The advantages are that the lexical chunk teaching used in the intensive reading class can increase the composition scores of college students and improve students’writing ability, especially in morphology, syntax and the length of the composition. We can conclude that the lexical chunk teaching can improve the accuracy, fluency and creativity of students’writing. But they have made a little improvement in content, consistency and other spelling and punctuation etc.The present study may shed light on research of similar kinds and serve as reference to college EFL teachers. But because of time limit and other objective reasons, the findings are far from satisfactory, many aspects being ignored. Expected are researches of larger scale on these aspects.