A Study On The Use Of Lexical Chunks In The Composition Of Intermediate And Advanced Chinese Learners With Native English Background

Research on language acquisition at home and abroad shows that lexical chunks play an important role in second language teaching.The frequent use of lexical chunks in language expression not only helps to reduce the burden of information reprocessing for second language learners,but also make their language expressions more appropriate and idiomatic.The use of lexical chunks in the written output of Chinese as a second language has been less studied.Based on HSK Dynamic Composition Corpus 2.0,this paper collects 40 compositions from intermediate and advanced level Chinese learners whose native language background is English,combines the existing block definition and classification,obtains the block list by software,and then manually confirms the block list according to the occurrence frequency of blocks in BCC corpus（>100 times）,and then make statistics and analysis by quantitative data.This study focuses on the following issues:1.What are the specific performance of the standard frequency,richness and correctness of lexical chunks produced in the compositions of intermediate and advanced Level Chinese learners whose native language background is English?What are the features of the number of lexical chunks used and lexical chunk errors?2.Is there a significant effect of chunks use on the performance of learners at different levels?3.What kind of help can be provided to guide learners’ writing based on their chunks use characteristics?To address several of these issues,this study conducted data statistics,correlation analysis and parameter testing of the data.The main findings of this study are as follows:1.Features of block use by Intermediate and advanced Chinese learners:（1）With the improvement of language level,advanced level Chinese learners whose native language background is English have higher standard frequency,richness and accuracy of chunks than intermediate level Chinese learners,but there is no significant difference in the index of chunk richness between them.（2）Intermediate and advanced level Chinese learners whose native language background is English use the same types of blocks,using more continuous blocks and less frame blocks in their compositions,but with the improvement of language proficiency,frame chunks tend to be on the rise,and learners’ use of idioms is significantly increased.（3）The highest error rate for intermediate and advanced level learners whose native language background is English is for frame blocks（32.43%）,followed by idiomatic blocks（31.08%）,and common collocative blocks（22.97%）,accounting for 86.48%of these three types of errors.For intermediate learners,the error rate of blocks decreases gradually from common collocative blocks to frame blocks and then to idiom blocks,while the error rate of these three blocks increases gradually for advanced learners.Therefore,intermediate learners and advanced learners have different teaching difficulties in chunk learning.2.For intermediate level learners,the number of correct use of blocks in the composition has no significant effect on writing performance;However,for advanced level students,the correct use of lexical blocks in the composition has a significant impact on writing performance.Based on the above findings,this paper considers that chunks dominated by chunk function and frequency can be selected as the main content of chunk teaching.The main ways of chunk teaching intervention range from strengthening chunk awareness to learning chunk knowledge,and finally combining with chunk practice to help students make more chunk output.This study investigates the characteristics of the use of language blocks in HSK compositions of intermediate and advanced level Chinese learners whose native language background is English,based on the real corpus of the learners’ output in the test.This study has certain enlightening significance in teaching of lexical chunks.