A Corpus-based Empirical Study Of Lexical Approach To English Writing Teaching For Non-english Major Postgraduates

The research of the thesis aims at conducting a corpus-based empirical study of lexical approach to English writing teaching for non-English major postgraduates to find out Chinese non-English major postgraduates' shortcomings in the use of lexical chunks in English essay writing and verify the hypothesis that lexical approach contributes to students' use of lexical chunks.Among the five basic language skills,namely,listening,speaking,reading,writing,and translating,writing as a productive skill has been playing an undoubtedly essential role in English teaching.The concept of lexical chunks was first put forward by Becker.Many researchers have verified that lexical chunks have a positive effect on people's English writing proficiency.Based on this research finding,to improve L2 learners'English writing proficiency,it is necessary to improve their use of lexical chunks.There are lots of theoretical studies on lexical chunks.However,the empirical studies on lexical chunks teaching for non-English major postgraduate students are rare.Thus,the author of the thesis chose 80 fresh non-English major postgraduates from Southeast University as the subjects.Self-made corpora were involved in the study to find out subjects' shortcomings in the use of lexical chunks compared with native English speakers' corpus.A self-made corpus is established based on students' authentic writing materials,which can reflect students' writing situations.Teachers can use these materials to find the problems existing in students' compositions and then solve the problems.After finding out students' deficiencies,in order to improve their use of lexical chunks,one-semester lexical chunks teaching was adopted in the teaching experiment.For lexical chunks teaching,Lewis proposed a new teaching method,namely,lexical approach.Lexical approach concentrates on generation,analysis,and tje use of language based on lexical chunks.The author applied this teaching method to the teaching experiment.The teaching experiment lasted for three months.Before the experiment,students were required to finish a questionnaire with the purpose of gathering some information about their English levels and attitudes toward English writing,lexical chunks and lexical chunks teaching.Three-word lexical chunks usually belong to part of four-word lexical chunks.Meanwhile,four-word lexical chunks can be used to make a more detailed classification in terms of structure compared with five-word or six-word lexical chunks.Thus,in the study,the author only selected four-word lexical chunks to analyze.A pretest and a posttest were designed to find students,problems in the use of lexical chunks and whether after the lexical chunks teaching these shortcomings could be improved.In the pretest,in order to find a standard,LOCNESS was treated as the standard corpus to make a comparison with Chinese students'use of lexical chunks in terms of structure in the pretest composition.AntConc was used to extract four-word lexical chunks and SPSS 21.0 was adopted to make a paired samples T-test.The result of the pretest showed that there were only 42 lexical chunks and the variety of lexical chunks used by the students was not enough.The most frequently lexical chunks occurring in native speakers' corpus were noun phrase fragments,while Chinese students tended to used many verb phrase fragments in their writings.After one-semester lexical chunks instruction,there were 132 lexical chunks in students'posttest compositions.As to the sequence order of the most frequently used lexical chunks of the students in the posttest compositions,the sequence of the first three categories of lexical chunks was the same as that in the native speakers' corpus,namely,noun phrase fragment,verb phrase fragment and prepositional fragment.The results of the paired samples T-test showed that the number and the variety of lexical chunks in the posttest both increased.The major findings of the study have provided future researches with some pedagogical applications.Students' awareness of lexical chunks should be strengthened.Teachers should instruct students to use as many various types of lexical chunks as possible and more noun phrase fragments in the English writings.Some interesting activities,such as making up stories with the given lexical chunks,should be designed to arouse students' interest.