A Study On Lexical Chunk Competence And Learning Strategies In English Of Senior One Students

The further understanding of the concept of "chunk" stems from the development of corpus linguistics. Researchers find that there are some elements which are extremely similar or completely identical in daily expressions for conversation in English, and the elements are equipped with the function of syntax and vocabulary. Besides, they exist in the brain in a fixed format and they are much easier for people to put into use, which are called lexical chunks. The explorations of lexical chunks are of great significance to acquire English efficiently and apply English in practice accurately and fluently. In China, researches on the lexical chunks mainly concentrate on the expansion of theories of lexical chunks and some relative empirical studies have not been conducted, let alone relevant researches on lexical chunks aiming at senior one students.This thesis studies110senior one students’levels of the lexical chunks and what kinds of learning strategies employed by them and then further analyzes the factors that affect the acquisitions of lexical chunks, accordingly putting forward some suggestions which are instrumental for the lexical chunk teaching with the help of lexical chunks competence test, learning strategies questionnaire for lexical chunks and the interview. The study finds that the senior one students have got some sense of lexical chunks and the lexical chunks competence, but it is still necessary to further strengthen those abilities; meanwhile, the data analysis shows the input frequency of lexical chunks has a significant impact on students’lexical chunks competence. In terms of lexical chunk learning strategies, students are able to better master some cognitive strategies, such as dictionary strategy, guessing and note-taking strategy; yet the level of the acquisition of metacognitive strategies is relatively poor, such as self-initiation and self-attention and so on. In addition, the data suggests that the note-taking strategy, dictionary strategy, guessing and self-initiation strategy quite markedly affect students’ lexical chunk competence. Finally, the author concludes that factors influencing students’ lexical chunks competence include learning strategies for lexical chunks, negative language transfer and the input frequency and so on according to the analysis on errors.