A Corpus-Based Study On The Use Of Lexical Chunks In College Non-English Major Students’ Argumentative Writings

The lexical chunks have become a big hot topic in second language acquisition field for a few years.This study tends to investigate the use condition of the lexical chunks in Chinese non-English major collegestudents’ argumentative compositions and reveal the difference in use of lexical chunks in their distributionfeatures, structure types and pragmatic functions in written English between Chinese non-English majorcollege students and native speakers, to guide the selection of the lexical chunks in second language writingteaching and second language learning, to promote the lexical chunks teaching and learning methods, toraise awareness of learning lexical chunks, to focus on accumulation and use of the lexical chunks, toimprove the selection and use of the lexical chunks, to reduce language errors, to improve using accuracyand expressive fluency in the use of the lexical chunks in English writing.Based on COLEC (College Learner English Corpus) and LOCNESS (Louvain Corpus of NativeEnglish Essays), adopting Altenberg’s framework and criteria, with COLEC (ST3and ST4) and LOCNESS(Part2and Part3) as research samples, this study extracted three-to six-word lexical chunks in twocorpora respectively with the help of AntConc software and manual filtering to explore the use of thelexical chunks in Chinese non-English major college students’ argumentative compositions aiming at threefollowing research questions:1) What is the distribution of the lexical chunks used in written English in COLEC and LOCNESSrespectively?2) What are the distribution characteristics and pragmatic functions of the lexical chunks in Chinesenon-English major college students’ argumentative writings?3) Which structural categories of the lexical chunks are overused or underused in Chinese non-Englishmajor college students’ argumentative writings by comparing with the native speakers?Statistics in this study shows that the use of the lexical chunks has universality in written English. Ahuge number of lexical chunks are frequently used in written English between Chinese non-English majorsand native speakers. The description tendency shows that the length of lexical chunks is inverselyproportional to the number of them and the number of chunks declines with the chunk length increasing.Three-word lexical chunks are always used the most and others declines in turn, and six-word lexicalchunks is the least in the use of lexical chunks. This study found that there were deviations in the use of thelexical chunks between Chinese non-English majors and native speakers. And Chinese non-English majorcollege students overused and underused the lexical chunks and colloquial tendency has universality in written English. As to the structure categories, clause constituents always occupy the largest proportion(87.6%) and full clauses are lower (7.2%) and incomplete phrases are the lowest (5.2%) in COLEC.Due to the limitation of software and manual filtering of themselves, there are a few deviations of thisstudy results. As to some problems above, some suggestions are conducted. Defects in technology andmethods can be overcome as much as possible in further studies, and much practice of the lexical chunksshould be strengthened in English teaching and learning.