The Study Of Lexical Chunks In College English Writing From The Perspective Of Organizing Functions

Writing has been an integral part of English examinations and takes up a certain proportion in the full grades.So many studies have been done in order to find a more efficient way to write a good composition.Among them,the role of lexical chunks has been the hot topic which many researchers have discussed.Lexical phrases,as the combination of form and function,are attracting more and more people in the field of second language acquisition.Lexical chunks are sets of words occurring with high frequency.If students are able to memorize as many chunks as possible,their compositions might be more fluent and appropriate.Meanwhile,it will save more time than making sentences word-by-word.Due to non-clear classifications,different linguists have different ways to classify them.The work of Sinclair,Nattinger,and Lewis shows their opinions clearly.The present thesis is based on Nattinger and DeCarrico's lexical chunks theory.Previous studies focus on the formal aspect of lexical chunks in English writing.Very little research is done from the perspective of organizing functions of lexical chunks.The research aims to explore whether there are significant differences between High-level group and Low-level group in the use of macro-organizers and study whether there is correlation between the use of macro-organizers and writing scores.In order to complete the research,the author collected 150 compositions from different majors in China University of Petroleum(East China).According to their ranking,the author selected the first 30 compositions to make up the high-level group and the last 30 compositions to make up the low-level group.Then the lexical chunks with organizing functions were counted out and marked with their functions.To ensure accuracy,the author counted these chunks three times.Finally,the author input the data together with the corresponding grades into SPSS 17.0 to make an analysis.The results show that students in the high-level group can use more macro-organizers than students in the low-level group.And the varieties of lexical chunks in the high-level group are richer than writings in the low-level group.The results of Independent Samples Test suggest that there are significant differences between the high-level group and low-level group in the use of topic markers,summarizers and relators.There is positive correlation between the number of macro-organizers and the writing scores.That is,the more macro-organizers used in the composition,the higher their grades are.In the correlation analysis of each type of lexical chunks and writing scores,we find that only topic markers,summarizers and relators are correlated with writing scores.These findings give us some pedagogical implications.Macro-organizers mark the overall direction of discourse and make a difference in composing an essay.If students succeed in using them,their compositions will be more fluent,more accurate and more native-like.So it is useful for teachers to lead students to pay attention to and use these macro-organizers.