A Study Of Lexical Chunks In Business English Correspondence Writings By Higher Vocational College Students

Vocabulary always plays a very crucial role in language learning. And lexical chunk, as an important component of vocabulary, is very beneficial to language learning. With the development of the corpus linguistics, many researchers find that there is a widespread occurrence of lexical chunks in actual language use. Through lots of studies of language, it is found that language is mainly made up of lexical chunks. They are productive and the fluency of language depends on how many lexical chunks are stored in people’s mind. People may acquire language on the basis of lexical chunks. Consequently, it is believed that lexical chunks play an essential part in language learning and lexical chunk approach can be applied to language learning and teaching.Since China joined the WTO, economic and trade exchanges between China and the world countries become more and more frequent. Business English correspondence, as one of the major methods of foreign exchange, becomes an important medium among the world countries to communicate with each other, to conduct business, to do a deal and to establish friendly relations and cooperation in international business activities, and it plays an important role in the international business communication. Through the actual classroom teaching of recent years, it is found that students in higher vocational college have a great number of business vocabulary and phrases in their mind, but the words and sentences they use in their writings are inappropriate.(Liu Xiaoping2011) In this case, it will be a new attempt to apply lexical chunks into the teaching of business English correspondence writing.This study begins with the definition, classification and functions of lexical chunks and focuses on the following two questions through quantitative and qualitative methods:1.What are the characteristics of the use of lexical chunks in business English writings by students in higher vocational college?2. What is the relationship between students’ use of lexical chunks and their writing proficiency? The subjects in this study are students majoring in business English, from one intact class of one higher vocational college. The author firstly selects50pieces of business English correspondence writing assignments of students;56students participate in the training and tests. And the author analyzes and summarizes the characteristics of the use of lexical chunks in business English correspondence writings on the basis of the theory of Nattinger and DeCarrico (2000). Then56students of one intact class are given the lexical chunks training and the two letter writing tests are arranged on them after training. Afterwards SPSS19.0software is adopted for analyzing the letter scores and the numbers of lexical chunks used in the two tests. Finally, interviews are made on5students with higher scores and5students with lower marks in the two tests with the aims to further explore the relationship between the use of lexical chunks and higher vocational college students’writing proficiency.The study findings are as follows:1) The frequency of using lexical chunks in business English correspondence by vocational college students is relatively high. In the four types of lexical chunks, sentence builders are most widely used, the next is phrasal constraints, followed by polywords and institutionalized expressions;2) The lexical chunks used by students have a positive effect on their business English correspondence writing proficiency.This study has the following suggestions for business English teaching:1) To promote vocabulary teaching by lexical chunks, enhance students’awareness of lexical chunks;2)To cultivate students’habit of organizing discourse in business correspondence based on lexical chunks;3) To provide more exercises according to lexical chunks and improve students writing proficiency on business English letters.