An Empirical Study Of The Effect Of Lexical Chunk Instruction On English Majors’ Writing In The Independent College

Writing can objectively reflect the student’s ability to use language.But in the reality of English teaching, it can be found that although some students have mastered a large number of vocabulary, their writing ability do not improve correspondingly. There are a lot of problems in the writing, such as Chinglish or the unclear expressions. Various reasons account for these problems. On the one hand, the lack of vocabulary is one case for the problem. Even though they have some vocabulary in mind, they fail to express themselves clearly and appropriately, because the students only produce sentences according to the words and grammatical rules memorized in mind. On the other hand, even though they have accumulated some useful lexical chunks, they do not have the consciousness to use the lexical chunks in the writing or they do not know how to use them correctly. To themselves, memorizing lexical chunks and writing are two separated parts. This paper takes the students in independent colleges as the research subject. This experiment lasts three months. The aim of this research is to arouse their awareness to use lexical chunks and combine lexical chunks learning with writing. Some concrete examples about how to use the lexical chunks are provided by taking full advantage of textbook. The author selects two classes, and oneis the EG(experimental group)and one is the CG(control group). Before the experiment, they are asked to write a composition, which is the pre-test. After the experiment, they are also asked to write another composition, which is the post-test. The composition scores and the number of lexical chunks in the writing are processed by SPSS 21.0 to answer three research questions:1) What is the effect on English majors’ awareness to use lexical chunks in writing after being given the lexical chunk instruction in the independent college?2) What is the relationship between the use of lexical chunks and writing scores of English majors’ in the independent college?To the first research question, the results show that after the lexical chunk instruction, the students’ awareness to use lexical chunks in writing has improved as the number of lexical chunks that they used in post-test have increased; And although the usage amount about phrasal constraints is more than sentence builders, the growth rate about the sentence builders is faster than sentence builders; Students have the consciousness to use lexical chunks they have learned. Because the value of the Mean about the use of lexical chunks in the textbook has enhanced, which illustrates that students have the consciousness to combine lexical chunks learning and writing; But statistics also proves that a few unadvanced lexical chunks is still used although the teacher has points out its relevantadvanced lexical chunks in the class.To the second research question, there are the findings. Students of EG make improvements in writing scores in the post-test, which is much higher than the pre-test. But more lexical chunks doesn’t always mean higher scores because student tend to overuse the lexical chunks and some of the lexical chunks are grammatically wrong; And it is the amount of sentence builders used in the post-test that directly relates to the students’ writing scores and plays a more important role than phrasal constraints.