An Empirical Study On The Application Of Lexical Chunks To College English Writing

With the international integration， English as an international languagereceived more and more attention. The highest requirements in listening，speaking，reading and writing in the four basic skills, writing is the most difficult. AlthoughChinese students have accumulated a certain amount of English vocabulary andgrammar knowledge， there are still many problems in their writing.Study in Corpus Linguistics finds that there is a large number of semi-fixed orfixed language structures both sentence and word characteristics in human brains.Meanwhile，many researchers have come to realize that “language output is not assynactic rule-governed process but is instead the retrieval of larger phrasal units frommemory”，(Zimmerman，1997), which means the building of sentences and text relygreatly on chunks not just on grammar and words. Lexical Approach based on thecombination of Structural Approach and Communicative Approach is an effectiveteaching method.Lexical Approach holds that l teachers should guide students to thelexical chunks such as collocations，idioms, semi-fixed and fixed phrases，etc. LexicalApproach has put forward and opens a new way to college English teaching.In recent years, the majority of domestic and foreign linguists are becomingincreasingly aware of the importance of lexical chunks in English teaching. Manylinguists have made a lot of studies on the chunking theory. But most of empiricalstudies on Lexical Approach are still is very limited. In this thesis，an empirical studyis conducted focusing on proving that lexical chunks are teachable and investigatingwhether the learning of lexical chunks aiming at improving college English writing issignificant or not.The experiment involved sophomores from two naturally occurring classes inHunan University of International Economics. The two classes were divided randomlyinto one experimental group and one control group. In this experiment，the controlgroup was taught the teaching methods of the past through18weeks. Meanwhile,Lexical approach was applied to the experimental group. In the term, students wereasked to write two compositions according to the CET-4writing requirements, and thegrades and the numbers of the chunks used in their composition were entered intoSPSS17.0for analysis. Meanwhile, interviews with students from experimental classesare conducted and sample compositions are analyzed.This paper tries to address the following three research question: 1.With the accumulation of in-depth English knowledge，lexical chunks canfurther improve the level of Chinese college learners’ English writing?.2.The chunk-based teaching method can significantly improve the accuracy andfluency of their English writing as well as their ability to organize a discourse forChinese college learners?3. When EFL learners are learning and using lexical chunks, their mother tonguemay have less negative transfer effect on the processes.At last, the author sums up the unique advantages of chunks in English teaching.It brings benefits to developing students’ self learning ability and improving Englishwriting skills. The author also reflects the problems arised in the experiment and pointsout the direction of studies in the future.