A Study On The Relationship Between Polytechnic College Students’ Learning Strategies For Lexical Chunks And Their English Writing Proficiency

With the rapid development of cognitive linguistics and corpus linguistics, research on lexical chunks has been hot in recent years. Bearing the merits of grammar, semantic meaning and context, it can release the load of language decoding during its processing, thus playing vital roles in fluency, accuracy and contextual appropriateness of language output. Chunk competence is considered to be a critical index of integrated language abilities.Domestic research rush concerning chunks gathers in the latest decade, a large portion of which is of chunks theory. Those empirical studies are mostly centered either on the application of Lewis’ lexical approach to teaching practice or on the relationship between the chunk competence and language proficiency. Few of them, however, make investigation into how the learners use language learning strategies to learn and master lexical chunks and how their language proficiency influences their choice and use of learning strategies. According to Wen Qiufang(2004:106), the mastery of learning strategies symbolizes attaining the ability of life-long study. Considering this fact, this study takes 125 polytechnic college students of ECIT as research subjects to investigate what learning strategies they use for lexical chunk learning and its relation to their English writing proficiency. The four major questions to be addressed are as follows:(1) What features will be presented in their use of learning strategies for lexical chunks?(2) What differences could be found in their use of learning strategies for lexical chunks between high-achieving group and lower-achieving group?(3) Is there any relation between the students’ learning strategies for lexical chunks and their English writing proficiency?(4) To what extent can the students’ learning strategies influence their English writing proficiency if any correlation exists?A questionnaire and an interview are adopted in this study and the quantitative data collected from the questionnaire are analyzed by the software SPSS17.0. Results show that these students’ English writing proficiency and their frequency of using learning strategies for lexical chunks both stay at a low level as general. They prefer using cognitive strategies most and social-affective strategies least; and guessing strategy, dictionary using, and note-taking are the most frequently used ones among the 11 individual strategies of the three strategies. As to the difference in learning strategies used by high-achieving group and low-achieving group, the former group tends to adopt learning strategies more frequently than the other, but both of the groups prefer using cognitive strategies most and social-affective strategies least. They do show difference in using individual strategies: the top three strategies for high-achieving group are guessing strategy, self-initiation strategy, and dictionary using, while guessing strategy, dictionary using, and note-taking are for low-achieving group. Regarding the relation, the highest correlated strategies are meta-cognitive strategies, and cognitive strategies are the next. Self-initiation strategy, guessing strategy and selective attention strategy are the three most significantly correlated individual strategies. Repetition strategy does not show statistical correlation. Its regression analysis indicates the greatest predictive power of meta-cognitive strategy among these three strategies.It can be safely concluded that when learning lexical chunks, polytechnic college students tend to adopt some low-level strategies of cognitive strategies, such as dictionary using, note-taking and guessing, whereas social-affective strategies and meta-cognitive strategies are not in their good command so as to be used effectively. All of these are suggestive of raising awareness of students’ learning strategies for lexical chunks and strengthening strategy training. Special attention should be given to training on using meta-cognitive strategies and social-affective strategies.