A Corpus-based Study On The Correlation Between Chinese Non-English Majors’ Chunk Competence And Their Writing Proficiency

Foreign language teaching aims to develop students’four major skills:listening, speaking, reading and writing. However, compositions of non-English majors are far from satisfactory. Most of Chinese students often fail to write a good composition in CET (College English Test), although they have been studying English for at least seven years and have learned a lot about English grammar and vocabulary. It is easy to find non-English majors are accustomed to seeking English equivalents for Chinese words in their minds word by word, and then with the help of grammatical rules piecing them together to form English sentences. The traditional English teaching approaches are to be blamed. As we know, grammar and vocabulary are treated separately in the college English classroom. Besides, single words have enjoyed much emphasis in instruction while less attention is paid to multi-word combinations.Actually, linguists’concern for lexical chunks, a kind of multi-word item, has been increasing since the1980s. Researchers have found out that there exists a large quantity of lexical chunks in real language and they play an extremely important role in native speakers’expressions. Substantial lexical chunks can help people produce language accurately and fluently. However, researches of lexical chunk in China began quite late, and mainly refer to theories. Studies on the correlation between lexical chunks and language performance have already been made and some significant findings have been obtained. However, the previous studies paid more attention to the oral proficiency. The survey on the relationship between chunks and writing proficiency was less explored. And the research objects of lexical chunks were often English majors. The present study focuses on non-English majors’writing. Therefore, based on the previous studies conducted on lexical chunks both at home and abroad, the present study examines the relationship between Chinese college students’English writing proficiency and their lexical chunk competence.The paper investigates the use of lexical chunks in120CET-6compositions from CLEC ST4, which are divided into two groups:high-mark group and low-mark group. The study aims to answer the following questions:(1) Is there any significant difference between the high-mark group learners and the low-mark group learners in lexical chunks using? Is there any difference between the two groups in both the total number of lexical chunks and every type of lexical chunks? Is there any difference between the two groups with regard to the rates of each type of lexical chunks?(2) Is there any correlation between English writing proficiency and lexical chunks using? Is there any correlation between the total number of lexical chunks and composition scores? And is there any correlation between every type of lexical chunks and composition scores?The author and another researcher manually underlined the lexical chunks one by one. Based on the working classification, the number of lexical chunks was counted into five types:polywords, collocations, phrasal constrains, institutionalized expressions, and sentence builders. The quantitative data were analyzed with SPSS17.0. Comparing lexical chunks in the two groups, it is obvious that there is significant difference on the total lexical chunks and each type. More lexical chunks of each type are used in high-mark compositions than in low-mark compositions. In other words, proficient students have a better command of lexical chunks than students of low-mark compositions. It is also found that there is significant positive correlation between the total number of lexical chunks used in compositions and the scores of compositions, and that all the five categories of lexical chunks are significantly positively correlated with the scores of compositions.So it is suggested that lexical chunks should be applied into classroom teaching to improve students’writing proficiency. Teachers need to raise students’awareness of lexical chunks and guide them to recognize lexical chunks by themselves. In addition, teachers should help students to acquire lexical chunks and use them properly. It is hoped that a wide range of chunk-based teaching materials for students of different levels will be developed, and that various chunk-oriented exercises will be designed.