A Study Of Effect Of Lexical Chunks On College English Writing

In the four basic skills in foreign language acquisition (listening, speaking, reading and writing), writing is the most difficult for college students. Although the student has mastered a certain amount of basic vocabulary and grammar knowledge, it is still a big headache for most students to write good compositions.Research in linguistics especially in corpus linguistics shows that there exist a great number of fixed or semi-fixed language structures which are characterized in both sentence and word, and this kind of patterns are stored in human brains as whole structures. Meanwhile, many researchers have realized that "Language production is not a syntactic rule-governed process but is instead the retrieval of larger phrasal units from memory" (Zimmerman, 1997), which means the building of sentences and text rely to a great extent on chunks not barely on grammatical rule and words. The new teaching concept of Lexical Approach ,which advocates "language is grammaticalised lexis, not lexicalised grammar" has put forward and opens a new way to college English teaching. It holds that language teaching should direct learners' attention to the lexical chunks such as collocations, idioms, fixed and semi-fixed phrased,etc.In recent years, linguists and foreign language teachers are becoming increasingly aware of the importance of lexical chunks in language learning and teaching. Many linguists have made a lot of studies on the chunking theory. But most of the present studies on lexical chunks still rest on the theoretical discussions, and empirical studies on Lexical Approach are seldom made. In this thesis, an empirical study is conducted aiming at proving that lexical chunks are learnable and teachable and investigating whether the learning of lexical chunks improves college English writing.The experiment involved sophomores coming from two naturally occurring classes in Hunan Institute of Science and Technology. The two classes were designated randomly as one experimental group and one control group. In this experiment, the control group was taught in the traditional teaching method through the whole term. In the mean time, lexical approach was applied to the experimental group. In the term, students were asked to write three compositions according to the CET-4 writing requirements, and the grades and the numbers of the chunks used in their composition were entered into SPSS13.o for analysis. Meanwhile , interviews with students from experimental classes are conducted and sample compositions are analysised. The results showed that:1. Chunks are teachable and learnable. Teaching steps and measures applied in this experiment are practical and effective.2. Lexical approach can promote writing fluency; facilitate language idimaticity and vividness, and cultivate text-organizing ability.3. Differences of Lexical Chunks between High-rated and Low-rated Compositions: in high-rated compositions, the lexical chunks used are high-frequent and rich. On the contrary, in low-rated compositions, the lexical chunks used are monotonous, limited and repeated.4. Mastery of different lexical chunks: of the four types, chunks for text-orgnization are the easiest to aquire.At last ,the author sums up the unique advatages of chunks in English teaching and puts forward some feasible strategies as some exploration into how to improve college students' English writing skills. The author also reflects the problems arised in the experiment and points out the direction of studies in the future.