A Study Of The Use Of Lexical Chunks Of Non-English Major Postgraduate Students’ English Writing

Writing is one of the four basic language skills in foreign language learning whichcan reflects learners’ language competence. Although both the teachers and studentsspend a lot of time on writing, it does not work effectively. Even though studentshave mastered a large number of English words, it is still hard for them to improvetheir English writing. So it is urgent to find an efficient way to improve students’writing ability.Lexical chunks study has been a major concern for many linguists and foreignlanguage instructors in recent years. Lexical chunk is a unit of memory organization,formed by bringing together a set of already formed chunks in memory. It can beretrieved as a whole or used after slight modification as a prefabricated chunk forlearners to use. Because of retrieving as a whole, the using of lexical chunks greatlyimprove the fluency of written language.A few empirical studies which show the development of lexical chunks inChinese learners’ English writing have been done. This thesis is based on Nattinger&Decarrico’s classifications and theory of lexical chunks and makes an investigation ofthe use of lexical chunks in the writing of the postgraduates of Xinjiang university. Itintends to find out how lexical chunks are used in the high-score compositions andlow-score compositions so as to answer these three research questions as follow:(1)What are the differences in the frequency of lexical chunks between high-scorecompositions and low-score compositions?(2)What are the differences in the fourtype types of lexical chunks between high-score compositions and low-scorecompositions?(3)Is there a correlation between the use of lexical chunks and thequality of the composition?The author chose138non-English major postgraduate students from XinjiangUniversity as the subjects and asked them to write a composition with150words in30minutes, and then chose80compositions and divided them into high-graded and low-graded compositions by9point. After counting the lexical chunks in each group,the author finds that there are more lexical chunks used in high-graded compositionsthan in low-graded compositions. It means that lexical chunks are related to thequality of writing. According to Nattinger&Decarrico’s classification of lexicalchunks, the author groups the lexical chunks used in Group A and Group B. It is foundthat phrasal constraints played the most important role in improving writingproficiency, which is followed by sentence builders, poly-words and institutionalizedexpressions. We also find that there are striking differences in the characteristics oflexical chunks between high-graded and low-graded compositions. There are a fewkinds of lexical chunks in low-graded compositions which are characterized bymonotony. The students in this group tend to make more mistakes in using lexicalchunks while the lexical chunks used in high-graded group are in various forms andfewer mistakes are found.Because of the important role of lexical chunks in English writing, the authorsuggests that teachers apply lexical chunks-based approach to Chinese English writingclasses and design lexical chunks-based exercises with the purpose of improvingChinese college English writing proficiency.