Study Of The Use Of Lexical Chunks In English Writing At Senior High School

English writing is an expressive skill which plays an irreplaceable part in the senior high schools because it is a productive language skill which shows the integrated language skills and language proficiency of senior high school students.However,in China,the phenomenon appears that a large number of students are afraid of writing.Additionally,many schools still ignore more effective teaching methods which can teach the students some word phrases or lexical chunks in English writing.Thus,many students have difficulty in choosing words and making sentences in writings,which cause their expression inaccurate or inauthentic.In order to change these situations,many educators and researchers in our country carry out many surveys on English writing through different perspectives,which find that the English lexical chunks can be beneficial to improve the accuracy,fluency and idiomaticity of English writings.However,a great number of scholars and teachers just pay more attention to making surveys on lexical approach of English writing in the colleges and universities or they mainly make surveys on the influence of lexical approach in English writing while a small number of researches focus on investigating the use of lexical chunks in senior high school students' English writings.Therefore,according to Lewis' lexical chunks classification theory,the author makes a survey on a key senior high school in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region by using composition analysis,questionnaire and interview.It randomly selects 80 students' mid-term examination of English compositions which come from Grade 10 of this school and there are 130 questionnaires sent out to the senior high school students.Besides,the author interviews four students at random.In general,this study mainly explores the use situation of lexical chunks in English compositions from the senior high school students.There are three questions studied in this thesis,which can be listed as follows:(1)What are the differences of use frequency of English lexical chunks between high-score and low-score compositions of senior high school students?(2)What are the differences of types of distribution between high-score and low-score compositions of senior high school students?(3)Which types of lexical chunks are the senior high school students prone to make mistakes?The major findings are as follows:(1)All the students in the senior high school can use lexical chunks in the English writings.However,generally we can find that the frequency of using lexical chunks in the high-score group is higher than that in low-score group.Besides,the number of using lexical chunks in the composition samples of high-score group is more than that of the low-score group.(2)Collocations are most frequently used in both the high-score group and low-score group,and poly words follow behind,and sentence frames and heads take the third place,and institutionalized expressions are at last.(3)As for the right rate of using lexical chunks,collocations are most prone to errors.In general,in this study,the author finds that students in the senior high school are almost lack of awareness of lexical chunks,besides,due to inadequate lexical chunks input,the output of the lexical chunks in writing is not ideal.Therefore,the author suggests teachers(1)improve the students' awareness of the lexical chunks;(2)teach students some strategies to facilitate the input and output of lexical chunks;(3)increase the training of lexical chunk output.For learners,they should:(1)widen channels of inputting and outputting the lexical chunks;(2)master the strategies of applying lexical chunks;(3)often reflect on the studying and applying lexical chunks.