A Study Of Correlation Between Lexical Chunks And High School Students’ English Writing Proficiency

With the new curriculum standards for high school students’ English writingrequirements further improving, English writing becomes more and more important inEnglish teaching in high school. But due to the limitation of vocabulary, the influence ofnegative transfer of mother tongue as well as the limitation of English writing skills, Englishwriting has always been a weak link in English teaching in high school.Lexical chunk, as a fixed or semi-fixed structure, is between grammar and vocabulary,which can be stored in the brain as a whole and directly extracted when people use. It canensure the accuracy and fluency of language use. In recent years, studies about the applicationof lexical chunks have been paid more and more attention, especially in the field ofvocabulary teaching. And most of the researches on lexical chunks face to English majors andcollege students, while few studies are on Chinese high school students’ English writing.Therefore, the thesis attempts from the perspective of the empirical survey to explore therelationship between the application of lexical chunks and high school students’ Englishwriting level. This study is mainly from the following three aspects:(1) what are generalcharacteristics of the application of lexical chunks in English writing in high school?(2) Whatare the features in high-grade and low-grade compositions respectively in the aspect of lexicalchunks use?(3) What is the relationship between the application of lexical chunks andEnglish writing achievement?This paper adopts the combination of quantitative and qualitative methods and takes thestudents of grade two in the Fifteenth High School in Taiyuan as the subjects. Their Englishcompositions in the middle-term and final examinations are all collected in order to build onecorpus. As a dividing line with9points, the compositions of more than9points belong to thehigh-grade group, while the compositions under9points belong to the low-grade group, afterwhich each100articles are selected randomly from the two groups. With the help of the software, AntConc3.2.4, lexical chunks are respectively picked up from the two groups fordata analysis. In the meantime, the questionnaire survey is conducted on high school studentsand the interview is carried out toward English teachers in high school so as to draw theconclusion.The research results show that the overall awareness of lexical chunks in English writingin high school is relatively weak. The number and type of lexical chunks in high-grade groupare much higher than the low-grade group. Therefore, the use of lexical chunks is positivelycorrelated with high school students’ English writing level. That is to say, the application oflanguage chunks has a positive influence on English writing achievement, which has somecertain enlightenment on the future English teaching and learning in order to help studentsimprove English writing ability.