Gender Differences In The Use Of Lexical Chunk In High School Students’ Writing

Lexical chunk, as a mode of block structure, is the unity of semantic meaning and pragmaticcontext. With the obvious advantage of overall storage and integral extraction, lexical chunk isnot only very convenient for students to memorize, but also combines grammar, semanticmeaning and pragmatic meaning, so lexical chunk becomes the basic unit in using language.Lexical chunk is gradually proved to have a close relationship with learners’ English level,especially playing an important role in learners’ English writing. Lexical chunk teaching is putforward due to the gradually deepened understanding of the function of lexical chunk.For a long time, gender difference has been treated as one of the most important factors ofindividual differences and the effect of gender difference on second language learning wasnoticed and the suggestion of giving teaching according to their gender was advocated.The present study, based on the lexical chunk theory, lexical chunk teaching as well as itseffect on second language acquisition, thoroughly analyzed English compositions written by highschool students and did a careful statistics about the employed lexical chunks. With comparativeanalysis adopted, the author discussed the gender difference as well as its performance in the useof lexical chunk in high school students’ English writing. The thesis calculated the total numberof used lexical chunks, the number of words appearing in form of lexical chunks, the averagenumber of lexical chunks as well as the lexical chunk frequency and classified the employedlexical chunks with400English compositions written by200high school students as its data.Besides, the present study discussed the difference performed by boys and girls in the use oflexical chunks and excerpted the high frequently employed lexical chunks, hoping to giveteachers some advice in their lexical chunk teaching, i.e. paying attention to the genderdifference and practicing their lexical chunk teaching according to gender.The present study combined the automatic searching of Windows word software andartificial marking of compositions, drawing the following conclusions through the extraction,classification, analysis and statistics.Firstly, there exist a lot of lexical chunks in students’ brain, and they can be extractedimmediately when students encounter the similar topics. This can be proved by the total numberof used lexical chunks in their English writing.Secondly, female differs with male with respect to the use of lexical chunks in theirEnglish writing. With the same number of compositions and the same title, the total number of words, average number of words, the number of lexical chunks, the number of words appearingin form of lexical chunks as well as average number of employed lexical chunks by femalesurpass those by male. And the conclusion was drawn that female uses lexical chunks morefrequently than males.Thirdly, with respect to the type of employed lexical chunks by two groups, female exceedsmale in all of the four types. However, with respect to the proportions of the four types in eachgroup respectively, both boys and girls use more poly words and phrasal constraints and fewerinstitutionalized expressions or sentence builders.Fourthly, according to the extracted lexical chunks high frequently used by students, theauthor displayed the concrete differences between boys and girls on their use of lexical chunks.From the above findings, it is shown that there are some differences between boys andgirls in the number, the frequency, and the type of employed lexical chunks, having their ownfeatures. Based on these, lexical chunk teaching is suggested to be brought to high schoolEnglish teaching, especially writing class. It is important for teachers, teaching syllable andmaterial, and students to emphasize the learning and using of lexical chunks. At the same time,teachers should take gender difference into consideration in their teaching, implementing lexicalchunk teaching based on the consideration of different memory characteristics and lexical-chunk-using features between female and male.