A Corpus-based Study On Lexical Chunks In Chinese English Majors’ Expository Writings

It is widely acknowledged that writing plays a significant role in English learning and writing quality has not been improved for a long time.Since lexical chunks are the composites of form and function,they have the advantages of efficient storage as well as extraction and they can be used to improve writing quality.In this study,60 Chinese English majors’ expository writings were selected form the Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners 2.0 and the focus is to explore the use of lexical chunks in these writings.The main findings are concluded as follows: 1.Chinese English majors are able to use a small number of lexical chunks in their expository writings.But the density of lexical chunks used by them is not very high and the variety of lexical chunks used by them is very limited.Compared with lexical chunks at sentence level,learners tend to use more lexical chunks at word level.2.The lexical chunks used in the writing samples of high-score group are larger in number and more diversified than those in low-score group.Through the comparison of lexical chunks used for the assertion function in writing samples,it shows that although the lexical chunks used by learners in both groups have the feature of oral style,the lexical chunks used by learners in high-score group are more objective than those by learners in low-score group.3.There is a significant difference in the use of phrasal constraints between the high-score group and low-score group.4.The correlation study shows that the frequency and variety of lexical chunks used are correlated with writing quality,which suggests when the density of lexical chunks is higher,the writing quality would be higher and when the lexical chunks used are more diversified,the writing quality would be higher.It can be inferred that the use of lexical chunks is helpful in improving writing quality.Therefore,teachers and students should focus on the learning and application of lexical chunks.