A Study On The Use Of Phrasal Constraints In English Writing By Senior School Students

EFL senior high school teachers have given due weight to English writing, and theyhave striven to explore useful and effective teaching methods such as Context-basedteaching methods. Nevertheless, students’ writing ability is still undesirable according tothe Error Analysis of L2learners based on Corpus studies such as CLEC. There are still alarge number of mistakes on lexical and grammar in students’ writing. Therefore, it isdesirable to study the use of lexical chunks in English writing by senior school students.According to Nattinger and DeCarrico (1992) lexical chunks are lexical phrases oflanguage with varying length loaded with pragmatic functions. In Nattinger&DeCarrico’s analysis, lexical chunks can also be divided into four groups according to thelexical chunks structural and functional characteristics:1) Polywords2) Institutionalizedexpressions3) Phrasal constraints4) Sentence builders. Phrasal constraints are short-tomedium-length phrases. They can be both canonical and non-canonical. They also canvariation of lexical and phrasal categories (NP, VP, Adv P, N, V, Adj, Adv, etc.). Most ofthem are continuous. As with polywords, phrasal constraints are associated with a widevariety of functions.The present study aims to investigate the frequency and distribution of phrasalconstraints of Chinese senior high school students’ writing. And to find out the typicalproblem in phrasal constraints exist in senior school students. And also to find out thedifferences between Chinese high school students and native speakers in the use ofphrasal constraints..In present research, two software---Wordsmith Tools6.0and SPSS13.0are used toretrieve and process the data. We adopt one of its main functions---Concord to retrievephrasal constraints in CLEC and BROWN. SPSS13.0is used for statistics analysis. Allfrequency and distribution differences between Chinese learners and native speakers aretested by means of chi-square test.The results indicate that, comparing with native speakers, Chinese senior high schoolstudents generally showed under-use in phrasal constraints, and that the mastery of different types of phrasal constraints was fair unbalanced. At the same time, it is alsofound that senior school students had an incomplete understanding of the pragmaticfunctions of certain phrasal constraints, and the distribution of phrasal constraintsrelatively simple.Some suggestions are proposed as to how to promote the teaching of senior Englishwriting. First, teachers need some changes:(1) Recognizing lexical chunks and theirpragmatic functions;（2）Exposing students to more authentic lexical chunks;（3）Selecting high frequency lexical chunks to teach;（4）Teaching how to use chunkscorrectly and appropriately;（5）Designing some activities and games related to lexicalchunks. Second, students all need some improvements:(1) Keeping the awareness oflexical chunks;(2) memorizing high frequency chunks as many as they can;(3)increasing the reading capacity. Lastly, pedagogical implications for materialdevelopment can be included as follow:(1) Making some changes in textbooks;（2）Using corpora as powerful learning tools.