A Study On The Use Of Lexical Bundles In Time-controlled Writing By Chinese College Students

The study of lexical bundles has attracted the attention of researchers in recent years. As important building blocks of language, lexical bundles have a direct influence on the writing competence of Chinese EFL learners. Four-word bundles are more phrasal in both structure and function and therefore they are becoming the most popular subject in the study of lexical bundles. Unfortunately Chinese students have weakness in English writings. CET4 or CET6, a popular test for almost all university students, is regarded as a critical criterion for many enterprises to weigh English proficiency of their employees. Recent studies on lexical bundles of Chinese EFL learners put emphasis on the academic writings, especially the thesis writings and there are few studies on the use of lexical bundles in CET4 or CET6 writings. As Chinese scholar Guanghui, Ma says, time-controlled writings are more likely to reflect one’s command of lexical bundles. Hence, the study on time-controlled writing is of great necessity.Corpus linguistics is one of the fastest-growing methodologies in contemporary linguistics. With the development of corpus linguistics, many approaches and studies have been done to study writings, in particular, the study of lexical bundles. Based on corpus data, the present study investigated the use of four-word lexical bundles in time-controlled writings by Chinese EFL learners, with the purpose to explore a comprehensive generalization of lexical bundles by Chinese EFL learners.Findings show that, firstly Chinese students tend to use more four-word target bundles than that of native English students, particularly the topic-related content bundles. Chinese EFL students prefer to use more verb bundles than noun bundles.Moreover there are significant functional differences between native and non-native students in argumentative writings, for example the passive verbs are used much less than active verbs by Chinese students. Secondly, there are comparatively little differences between four-word bundles used by Chinese students in argumentative writings and four-word bundles in expository writings. But students try to use more functional bundles in argumentative writings than expository writings though the percentage is quite lower than native speakers. Thirdly, there is a positive correlation between English writing proficiency and the frequency of verb bundles in Chinese students’ writings, but no correlation between writing proficiency and use of noun bundles.The findings have some implication for the teaching of Chinese EFL students’writing. Firstly teachers might put much more emphasis on the teaching of lexical bundles, especially the noun bundles and verb bundles. Secondly, teachers should pay attention to the function and structure of lexical bundles in both argumentative and expository writings, especially the knowledge of functions of lexical bundles. Thirdly more efforts should be made to improve the appropriate use of verb phrases and improve the quantity of noun bundles.