A Study On Lexical Chunks Used In Argumentative Writings Of Non-english Majors

Writing is one of the essential components of basic skills in English learning,which to some extent,demands students not only to master vocabulary,but also to change their creative use of words into written discourses.At present,however,it is common that a large number of college students have an inadequate amount of vocabulary in their English writings or even having mastered large amount of English words,they still have difficulties in producing writings with fluency and accuracy.In recent years,there is ever-increasing number of researchers coming to join in the study of lexical chunks in the field of second language learning.For example: Wood(2006),Leedham(2013),Wei(2004)and Wang & Li(2014).According to Leedham(2013),language learners with high proficiency applied a great deal of lexical chunks in their writings;While learners with low proficiency used small amount of lexical chunks,and inclined to use single words.The study lays great emphasis on the notable importance of lexical chunks in Language learning.On the basis of the development of corpus linguistics,a large number of lexical chunks in texts could be retrieved and extracted via retrieval software,which is generally believed that it is possible to analyze lexical chunks according to large data of real language.Based on the significant and objective of lexical chunks and corpora database,the author in this study focuses on lexical chunks used in argumentative writings of non-English majors.The present study aims to investigate:(1)the general descriptions of 3-5 word lexical chunks used in students' argumentative writings.(2)The correlation between high and low scores groups on the use of lexical chunks and argumentative writing scores.The participants were 3369 non-English majors from Guizhou University.They have entered for the 2015 Nationwide Writing Contest,which was held by the writing website called www.pigai.org..The topic is “We are What We Read”.The corpora in this study were collected from their e-text of writings and offered by the back-stage management of www.pigai.org..After the procedure of filtering,cleaning and annotating,the self-built corpus namelyWECGZUL(Written English Corpus of Guizhou University Learners)was completed.First of all,with the combination of AntConc and manual selection,3-5word lexical chunks were extracted.Then,according to the classifications of lexical chunks proposed by Nattinger & DeCarrico(1992),the four types of lexical chunks were discussed and analyzed.Lastly,with the help of SPSS,the present study made correlation analysis on the use of lexical chunks and scores of students' writings between the high and low score groups.The Independent-sample test and Pearson analysis were mainly employed.The findings showed that first,students applied a great number of lexical chunks in their argumentative writings,and the longer the lexical chunks are,the less they were applied by students.Besides,all the four types of lexical chunks were included in which poly-words take up the largest proportion,followed by phrasal constraints,sentence builder and institutional expressions.Second,functions of stance,discourse organizer and referential expression had notable influence on the use of lexical chunks by the students.Lastly,the results indicated that there exist great difference between the high and low score groups in their writing scores and amount of lexical chunks.Also,students' use of lexical chunks and the scores of their argumentative writings was significantly correlated.The present study contributes to provide objective references on college English teaching of non-English majors,and to some extent,it has relativity of future study on the English writing.Teachers in colleges are supposed to offer help for students about the concept of lexical chunks and lead them to form the habit of applying lexical chunks as much as possible so that they could make conscious efforts to learn and employ lexical chunks in English writings.