A Survey Of The Use Of Lexical Chunks In English Writing By Junior Middle School Students

Lexical chunks are the language units which exist with high frequency in language.They have relatively fixed structures with advantages of grammatical rules,semantics and context.Lexical chunks can be stored in memory as a whole and retrieved and used directly by foreign language learners.The use of lexical chunks may help learners communicate more effectively and facilitate fluency and accuracy in both spoken and written language.In the light of these chunks advantages,scholars at home have made lots of investigations into the relationship between lexical chunks and English writing through different aspects.Recent researches have demonstrated that lexical chunks play a significant role in English writing,and the use of lexical chunks is good for fluency,accuracy and idiomaticity of English writing.However,most of the present studies have senior high school students and college students as subjects and researches on lexical chunks in English writing by junior school students have been conducted much less.This thesis,based on the theory of chunks by Michael Lewis in 1997,uses methods of quantitative analysis,comparative analysis and questionnaire survey and takes junior high school students in Huaibei as subjects.120 compositions are selected to analyze the use of lexical chunks by the high-graded and low-graded groups in junior high school English writing.What's more,166 valid questionnaires out of 180 are collected to observe their learning and using of lexical chunks and English writing.Four questions are addressed as follows:(1)What are the frequency differences of lexical chunks used in high-graded and low-graded compositions from the three grades of the junior high school?(2)What are the differences and similarities between the different categories of lexical chunks in high-graded and low-graded compositions from the three grades of the junior high school?(3)Are there any significant differences in the use of the same category of lexical chunks in the high-graded and low-graded compositions from the three grades of the junior high school?(4)What is the correlation between the application of lexical chunks and students' writing scores?The major findings are as follows:(1)In these three grades,the frequency of lexical chunks used in high-graded groups is much higher than that in low-graded groups.Students in high-graded groups can not only produce longer compositions,but apply more lexical chunks than those in low-graded groups.They have stronger awareness in using lexical chunks.(2)The largest proportion of lexical chunks used in junior high school students' compositions is collocations,followed by polywords.Sentence frames and heads take the third place,with institutionalized utterances least used.(3)There are significant differences in the use of polywords,collocations,and sentence frames and heads in high-graded groups,and these three categories of lexical chunks used in high-graded groups are much more than those in low-graded groups.That suggests these three kinds of lexical chunks are more helpful to English writing.(4)The number of lexical chunks applied in students' writings has a high positive correlation with their writing scores,writings with more lexical chunks deserve high scores.All in all,the application of lexical chunks will enhance the quality of junior high school students' composition,however,students' performance in the number and categories of using chunks remains imbalanced.Therefore,English teachers in junior high schools should help students strengthen their awareness of lexical chunks and cultivate their abilities to discriminate them.What's more,teachers should increase the productive practice of lexical chunks to cultivate students' generative abilities of lexical chunks,so that students are able to accurately use different types of lexical chunks in their writings and improve their writing proficiency step by step.