An Empirical Study Of Lexical Chunk Approach In College English Writing Teaching

Lexical chunk is a language unit that possesses both lexical and grammatical character,and it is also the minimum unit of language in memory,storage and output,from the psychological perspective.Lexical chunks can be stored as a whole in human's mind,and be retrieved directly without generating by grammar rules,for they are readymade units.Applying lexical chunk approach on English writing teaching can increase language processing efficiency,ease learners' pressure in writing,and enhance the fluency and native-like lexical selection of learners' writings.At present,Chinese researchers focus on exploring the application of lexical chunks in English teaching from different aspects.The total number of studies related to college students is not a few,but the classification researchers always adopted is whether English major or not,few take into consideration of students' starting point of English study and their first language.The purpose of this study is to verify the effectiveness of lexical chunk approach on students' English writing teaching in Beifang University of Nationalities,by applying the approach throughout the teaching process.This thesis aims to answer the following questions:(1)Could the lexical chunk approach stimulate the college students' enthusiasm in English writing?(2)Could the lexical chunk approach improve effectively the college students'English writing proficiency?(3)What are the differences in using lexical chunks in English writing by the college students of different starting point of English study after experiment?The participants in this study are 62 non-English major freshmen selected from Beifang University of Nationalities,and are divided into three groups according to the starting time of their formal English education in school—primary,middle school and college.The 62 students belong to two parallel classes with 31 students in each class respectively.One of the classes is assigned as experiment class(EC)at random,and the other as control class(CC).The students in both classes performed similarly in English based on their scores of the college entrance examination.The instruments of this study are questionnaires,tests and interviews and the experimental span lasted for four months.The students in the experimental class are taught by lexical chunk approach,while the students in the controlled class are taught by traditional teaching method during the experiment.After the experiment,all the data were analyzed with SPSS 23.0,involving One-way Anova,Paired-samples T-tests,Independent-samples T-tests,Correlations and Regression.The results verified that the application of lexical chunk approach on college English writing teaching in Beifang University of Nationalities can improve students'writing ability and raise their awareness of using lexical chunks as well as their initiatives and self-confidence in English learning;the numbers of lexical chunks increased differently among the students of different English learning experiences;the differences in using lexical chunks in post-test among three groups of EC focus mainly on the respective of the structural categories and the functional perspective of lexical chunks as well as the accuracy of collocation;the influence of first language makes little difference in terms of the number of lexical chunks among different groups.