| Writing has always been one of the difficulties of language teaching and learning. Even after studying English for a long time and spending countless efforts grasping grammar and vocabulary, a large majority of students still can’t write fluently, appropriately and idiomatically. Many factors give rise to this problem, and one of the major factors is the traditional teaching method in English writing. Under the traditional teaching method, English teachers tend to teach their students’ writing by offering a great amount of isolated words and sentences. Thus, students don’t know how to organize discourse structure. In view of the weakness of the traditional grammar-based approach, the communicative approach, stressing the appropriate use of language, becomes a popular method for teaching. Nevertheless, this approach also leads to a number of problems, one of which is that it neglects the vital function of grammar in the process of language acquisition. As a result, it runs the risk of producing inaccurate use of language. Considering the drawbacks of the two approaches, many researchers advocate a compromise between the traditional and the communicative method for effective teaching. Thus, lexical chunks are said to meet this demand and attracting more and more experts’ attention. A great many experts consider that lexical chunks can promote students’ writing fluency, idiomaticity, and appropriateness.As to the current studies of lexical chunks, researchers concentrate more on lexical chunks in second language acquisition at the theoretical level. Empirical studies are fewer. Corpus-based studies focus more on the relationship between lexical chunks and oral production. Researches focusing on the correlation between the use of lexical chunks and English writing proficiency are relatively rare, among which researches taking English majors as subjects are much less. Thus, this thesis tries to study the correlation between the use of lexical chunks and English writing proficiency.This thesis aims to answer the following three questions:1. Which kind of lexical chunks is most frequently used in Chinese English majors’ expository writing?2. What are the differences between the high-level group and low-level group in the use of lexical chunks?3. To what extent does the use of lexical chunks correlate with English writing proficiency?A corpus-based approach is adopted to answer the above questions. First,30 expository writings are chosen as samples from WECCL 2.0, a sub-corpus of SWECCL 2.0. These writings are classified into two groups, namely, high-level group and low-level group. What’s more, lexical chunks in these writings are identified and divided into four categories according to Nattinger and Decarrico’s classification.The major finding and conclusions are as follows:Firstly, as to the general condition of lexical chunks used in students’ writings, students tend to use lexical chunks with relatively limited variety and in small amount. As for the distribution of four types of lexical chunks, phrasal constraints come first, sentence builders come second, then polywords, and finally, institutionalized expressions. Secondly, through comparing lexical chunks used by students with different level, the differences between two groups can be identified. The comparison shows that high-level students excel low-level students in the frequency and variety of lexical chunks being used. In addition, high-level students tend to use a larger number of sentence builders and phrasal constraints than low-level students. Lastly, the frequency of lexical chunks is positively correlated with students’ writing proficiency. In other words, the more the lexical chunks are used in English writing, the higher the students’ writing proficiency is.Based on the above findings, this research has implications for the teaching of English writing. The research results help attract students’ attention to the learning of lexical chunks, and thus improve their writing proficiency. |
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