A Corpus-Based Study On The Correlation Between The Use Of Lexical Chunks In English Majors’ Expository Writings And Their Writing Proficiency

It is widely acknowledged that writing, as one of the five fundamental skills, has always been an indispensable part of English Language Teaching. Lexical chunk has played a very important role in writing. Leedham et al.(2013) have found out that the skilled language user commands a repertoire of lexical chunks, while the lower-level user struggles with lexical chunks, and they prefer single lexical items. According to Yuan et al.(2010), lexical chunks are conducive to the production of more accurate and more fluent language by language learners.Thus, lexical chunks have received an increasing amount of attention in Second Language Acquisition in recent years. Corpus linguistics has developed rapidly with the development of computer technology, which has made it possible to conduct studies more effectively on lexical chunks through a large empirical database.The present study has intended to investigate the relationship between the use of lexical chunks in English majors’ expository writings and their writing proficiency. In essence, the hypothesis has been examined, whether lexical chunks facilitate language learners’ writing proficiency. The study also aimed to look at whether there are differences on the use of lexical chunks between advanced language learners and low-level learners. If it is indeed the case, the further question would be investigated, i.e., What are the differences on the use of each category of lexical chunks in expository writings between the advanced language learners and low-level learners? The specific questions are shown as follow:RQ1: Whether lexical chunks facilitate language learners’ writing proficiency?RQ2: Whether there are any differences on the use of lexical chunks in expository writings between the advanced language learners and low-level learners? If it is the case,what are the differences on the use of each category of lexical chunks(polywords, phrasal constraints, sentence builders) in expository writings between the advanced language learners and low-level learners?To some extent, corpus-based approach underpinned the study by providing authentic language learners’ data. And quantitative research approach was adopted in order to provide a relatively holistic and comprehensive view on the relationship between the use of lexical chunks and the writing proficiency of students. WECCL, Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners, sub-corpus of SWECCL was involved. The sub-corpus of WECCL, which includes270 expository writings from English majors, served as the research corpus. Ant Conc served as the primary tool to collect data. And SPSS, Statistical Product and Service Solutions was adopted to analyze the data. The research result has shown that the use of lexical chunks in expository writings and students’ writing proficiency do correlate to each other, but to a low degree. For the use of lexical chunks, advanced language learners use more lexical than low-level learners in expository writings. Also, the study has confirmed that the use of polywords, phrasal constraints, and sentence builders between advanced language learners and low-level learners is different. Practical suggestions for pedagogy and future research were also identified at the end of the research.This study contributes a bit to an understanding of the role played by lexical chunks in expository writings, based on the analysis of the learners’ data. While a number of studies related to the present research have been undertaken in the past, the focus of the earlier works were based predominantly on the use of lexical chunks in argumentative writings. This present study differs from the previous studies to some extent that it provides relatively comprehensive evidence covering the actual use of lexical chunks in expository writings by English majors and the relationship between the use of lexical chunks and students’ writing proficiency.