A Study On The Use Of Lexical Chunks In Senior Three Students' English Practical Writing

The researches of lexical chunks can date back to 1970 s.And with the development of corpus linguistics,an increasing number of researchs pay more attention to the role and significance of lexical chunks in language acquisition and application,such as the survey of the application of lexical chunks in English writing.Previous studies on lexical chunks mostly focused on the classification and frequency analysis but less on the accuracy of lexical chunks used by second or foreign language learners.This study mainly aims to compare the frequency and accuracy of lexical chunks used by different English levels of senior high school students.This research,based on lexical chunks theory and the classification of lexical chunks by Lewis(1997),takes 101 seniors from Shangrao NO.2 Middle School as participants and compare the frequency and accuracy of lexical chunks used in 51 high score compositions and 50 low score compositions.The author also analyzes the correlation between the use of lexical chunks and the quality of compositions.In order to know how students learn lexical chunks,a follow-up questionnaire is made to investigate the strategies of learning lexical chunks.It gives a meaningful inspiration to the future English writing learning and teaching.The results show that,first of all,students in high score group can not only write longer compositions but also can produce more lexical chunks of each category than those in low score group.The frequency of using of lexical chunks is obviously higher in high score group compared with low score group.Collocation takes up the largest proportion in both groups.Secondly,through the means of T-test,the results reveal that there are significantly more poly words,collocations and sentence frames and heads in high score compositions than those in low score compositions while institutionalized utterances in both group have no significant difference.Furthermore,the accuracy in high score group of four categories is higher than that in low score group,especially institutionalized utterances.It indicates that students in low score group are prone to use colloquial words in written English.And the highest accuracy is poly word.Thirdly,poly word,collocations and sentence frames and heads have significantly positive correlation with composition scores.However,institutionalizedutterances have negative correlation with composition scores.Lastly,from the analysis of questionnaire,the results are released that students' attitude is neutral about lexical chunks and the strategies of lexical chunks learning are above the medium level.The above findings presents that teachers should focus more on lexical chunks and enhance their teaching method to cultivate students' awareness and strategies of lexical chunks learning.Students should make a point of reviewing and accumulation of lexical chunks in their English writing to promote writing proficiency.