A Study On The Role Of Lexical Chunks In College English Writing

In China English writing is always an obligatory course in college and is also regarded as a weak point in English learning. Among the four basic skills in college English learning, writing is viewed as the hardest part, it occupied a large proportion in examinations. English writing not only involves memorizing vocabulary, but also requires to internalize what they have learned and then to produce them creatively. With the traditional learning strategy, students always follow the order to learn English writing, which they first spent a lot of time having stored a large number of words and phrases in minds and then learned how to construct an article, but to their appointment they still can not produce a good composition. They are often at a loss as to what words or phrases to choose in certain situations, or what they have produced does not accord with English usage. It is obvious that understanding a word and outputting a word belong to different processes. Outputting is more active, complicated and thus much more difficult.(Shu Dingfang&Zhuang Zhixiang,1996). Therefore, how to cultivate students’ability to output their thoughts in writing accurately, fluently and efficiently deserves a higher priority in college English teaching.Recently, theories of lexical chunks have been adopted as a new pedagogical perspective into foreign language teaching. According to the lexical approach theory advanced by Michael Lewis in1993, language is composed of grammaticalized "chunks" of words rather than individual words. Lexical chunks, as the minimum unit of language input, memory, storage and output, possess both lexical and grammatical characters. They can be stored in human’s memory system as a unified whole and be retrieved directly when necessary. The application of lexical chunks to second language learning can effectively increase language processing efficiency and finally make learners’ expression more fluent, accurate and native-like. So it has wide application prospect in English teaching and learning.This experimental study, on the basis of the lexical chunks theory, is carried out in order to explore the effectiveness of facilitating college students’ writing proficiency by incorporating the lexical approach into college English lessons, and propose its pedagogical implications with a hope to provide a new insight into college English teaching. After one-semester experiment the author find that utilizing lexical chunks instruction could raise students’ ability of writing and increase the amount of lexical chunks in the writing. In addition, lexical chunks instruction can effectively level up learners’ interest in writing and their autonomous learning ability in English writing. Learners’learning strategy in acquiring lexical chunks stimulates their desire in learning English writing and their self-confidence in learning English.This thesis consists of five chapters:introduction, literature review, research design, data analysis and discussion and conclusion. Chapter one mainly tells us the need, aims and the structure of this thesis; chapter two provides an overall review of theoretical bases, it consist of definitions, classifications of lexical chunks, lexical chunks in different perspectives and briefly introduced the lexical approach of Michael Lewis and studies on lexical chunks in China; chapter three includes research questions, hypotheses, subjects, test tools, data collection and procedure of the experiment; chapter four presents the analysis and discussions of two compositions and the questionnaire and some pedagogical recommendations; the last chapter gives us the main findings, the limitations of this thesis and some suggestions for future research are also given at the last part of this chapter.