A Corpus-based Study On Lexical Chunks In High School English Writing

Writing is an important part of English learning and the embodiment of students' English proficiency level.However,through the author's observation of the students' English composition,it is found that there are many problems.According to the existing researches at home and abroad,lexical problems are the most important factors affecting students' writing,which makes vocabulary become an important field of language research.This paper adopts corpus-based approaches,analyzing the distribution and pragmatic functions of lexical chunks in senior high school English writing.The author tries to make a systematic investigation on the three questions:(1)What is the distribution of different types of lexical chunks in high and low grouping compositions?(2)What are the most commonly used lexical chunks in high school students' practical writing? What functions do they have?(3)Is there any correlation between students' composition achievements and the use of lexical chunks? In this study,the author extracted 3 to 6 word chunks from students' compositions with the help of AntConc3.2.1w,and obtained the target word chunks by manual filtering.According to Nattinger and Decarrico's classification(1992),all these lexical chunks were classified into four categories: polywords,institutionalized expressions,phrasal constraints and sentence builders.The distribution of these four kinds of lexical chunks used by high-score group and low-score group was compared.Then,based on Biber et al.'s taxonomy(2003),the functions of the most frequently used lexical chunks were analyzed.The study finds out:(1)The type-token ratio of high-scored group is 11,while that of low-scored group is 10,which indicates that there is no significant difference in vocabulary richness among senior three students,but there is a significant difference between the two groups in the use of polywords and sentence builder.The percentages of polywords in high-scored group and low-scored group are 18.22% and 23.27% respectively,and the sentence builder ratio are31.05% and 27.37% respectively.Both groups used less institutionalized expressions(3.24%and 3.42%).The proportion of phrasal constraints in high-scored group is 47.49%,and that inlow-scored group is 45.94%.(2)In terms of the function of lexical chunks,the most commonly used lexical chunks by the two groups are content-related chunks,stance-expressing chunks and indicative chunks,and text-organized chunks are the least.Generally speaking,both groups of students have a certain sense of lexical chunks,but the sense of textual cohesion is not strong enough.(3)The students' writing scores are significantly correlated with the frequency of use of lexical chunks(P <0.05).In other words,the more words the students used,the higher the score of composition they got.According to the above research results,the author puts forward three teaching suggestions: first,teachers ought to help students to cultivate the awareness of lexical chunks and strengthen their memory of lexical chunks;Secondly,teachers can use corpus to help students obtain the real language used by native speakers,so as to improve students' writing ability.Finally,students should strengthen their learning of text-organized lexical chunks,and they should be trained to form the writing mode of native English speakers.