A Study On English-Major Students' Ability To Identify Prefabricated Chunks

The prefabricated chunks have drawn a lot of attention these days.Although there have been a lot of research into the correlation between the prefabricated chunks and writing.However,there lacks some research into the students' way of identifying the chunks.The research probes into the relationship between the prefabricated chunks and second language acquisition.the subjects of the research are the first year college students majoring in English from ChangChun Normal University.They share similar English learning experience and spend similar time in English learning.We have divided them into two groups according to their performance in College Entrance Examination which reflect their English proficiency level.The sheets of paper of the participants,are divided into Group 1 and Group 2.Group 1(25 members in total) has lower scores,therefore the first group has a comparatively lower level of English language proficiency,while the subjects in Group 2(50) have higher scores.In order to make sure that there is obviously a gap between the two groups' proficiency level, some of the subjects in the middle were not chosen due to the difficulty in the classifying into either the top or the bottom groups.The reading materials are selected from the Test for English Majors Band four and Test for English Majors Band 8.The topics and length of the two are similar,while we choose to select the text from different books so that the degree of difficulty for the material is different.The test has proved that students' ability to identify the prefabricated chunks relates to their seond language proficiency level.When students have better command of second language and tend to achieve higher scores in English test,they could identify more prefabricated chunks.The author of this thesis strongly recommends that the students should acquire the knowledge of the chunks in the specific context,rather than in isolation.Instead of requiring learners to memorize individual words,a teacher could extend the words through their collocations,descriptive partners or contextual expressions.