An Empirical Study On The Use Of Lexical Chunk In The Writings By Non-english Major Postgraduates

Having been studying English for years,many Chinese EFL learners are still not equipped with satisfactory writing skills.Even intermediate and advanced learners who have a good command of words and grammatical rules cannot write a good composition.The use of vocabulary in writing is a particularly prominent cause.Specifically,sentences do not conform to the way of English expressions;words and phrases can't be used properly in the appropriate context;collocations as well as lexical expression seem to lack variety.What's more,affected by the negative transfer of mother tongue,Chinese learners tend to translate Chinese to English word for word,which is not an uncommon phenomenon in their writings.Lexical chunks are form/function composites and lexico-grammatical units that combine grammar,semantics and context together.They contain more information than a single word and can be memorized as wholes easy for both storage and extraction,so as to save a lot of processing time and make expressions more idiomatic.Thus lexical chunks open a new perspective for second language vocabulary acquisition and help English learners with the high quality writing.The empirical study chooses 57 non-English major postgraduate students from Central China Normal University as participants.Each participant is required to write an English argumentation about environment pollution with at least 150 words in 30 minutes.For the sake of comparison related to the present study,20 high-scored writings and 20 low-scored writings are selected from the valid writing samples.SPSS 21.0 is utilized to carry out the independent sample t-test and Pearson correlation,providing quantitative analysis of lexical chunk use in English writing material.There are three questions to be addressed in the present paper.1)What are the general characteristics of lexical chunks in non-English major postgraduates' writings?2)Are there any differences in the use of lexical chunks between high-scored writings and low-scored writings?3)Does the use of lexical chunks correlate with writing grade?The major findings are as follows:(1)Non-English major postgraduates use four types of lexical chunks,i.e.poly words,phrasal constraints,sentence builders and institutional expressions.Phrasal constraints are used most,followed by sentence builders,poly words and institutional expressions.(2)High-scored group use more lexical chunks of each type than that low-scored group and there is a vast significance in the use of sentence builders and phrasal constraints.(3)Lexical chunks of different types have different correlation with writing grades,among which,phrasal constraints have a stronger correlation than poly words and sentence builders,while institutional expressions are negatively correlated with the writing grade.This study brings us some implications of English lexical teaching and learning.As the use of lexical chunks plays an important role in English writing,the author suggests that English learners should grasp lexical chunks as many as possible so as to improve their English writing proficiency.At the same time,it is suggested that the teachers should use lexical approach in English teaching,focusing on the cultivation of learners'lexical competence and improving the English writing ability of non-English majors.