A Study On The Application Of Lexical Chunks In Non-English Majors’ Writing

Among the four basic language skills that are listening, speaking, readingand writing, writing is the most difficult one for college students to master.Lexical approach, proposed by Michael Lewis wins great popularity in the field oflanguage acquisition. This approach stresses the importance of using lexicalchunks in English learning. Lexical chunks are different from single words. Theyare the prefabricated and ready-made phrases which are stored in the learners’brains. Lexical chunks are not separate words. Instead, they are meaningfullanguage units. They are the combinations of both form and function, which canbe regarded as a whole in learners’ brains, making it easier for learners to pick upand employ. They also make the language output more convenient and play anincreasingly significant role in EFL teaching.Based on the lexical approach proposed by Lewis, the author attempts toemploy the lexical chunks into the college English intensive class. An empiricalstudy is carried out in China University of Geosciences (Beijing) with60subjectsin two different schools respectively. This experiment lasts16weeks. In theexperimental group, lexical approach is adopted so as to build students’ sense ofusing lexical chunks, which can improve their writing proficiency. Compared toEG, students in CG are taught by the traditional teaching method. What’s more, inthis thesis, the author puts forward three research questions. They are as follows:(1). Do the college students (non-English majors) have the awareness of learningand using lexical chunks?(2). Do the lexical chunks have effects on collegestudents’ writing proficiency?(3). How to facilitate students’ writing ability byapplying lexical chunks?In order to have a comprehensive study on these subjects, this experimentincludes both qualitative and quantitative research methods. Questionnaires and interviews would be employed in the qualitative research. On the other hand, inthe quantitative research, it consists of pre-test writing, post-test writing and thevocabulary test in this study. Then the author uses SPSS16.0to analyze all thedata. Descriptive statistics, independent samples T-test and paired samples T-testshow that lexical approach can improve non-English majors’ English writingproficiency to a large extent. In addition, the Pearson correlation further suggeststhat the number of using of lexical chunks has a strongly positive effect on thecomposition scores. Thus, the appropriate application of lexical chunkscontributes a lot to the accuracy and fluency of writing.At the end of this thesis, the author points out some limitations of the studyand puts forward some suggestions in the hope of shedding some lights on thefuture college English writing teaching.