A Corpus-based Study Of English Lexical Chunks In Senior High School Students’ Writing

Writing is a significant part in English learning, but according to the author’s longterm observation, there are a lot of problems in students’ writing. According to NewEnglish Curriculum Standard, students’ expression ability should be improved duringhigh school period, as well as the logical ability of thinking in English.Michael Lewis firstly proposes the concept “Language consists of grammaticallexis---not lexicalized grammar” in his work The Lexical Chunks in1993, and he alsobelieves that lexical chunks should be considered as the centre of English study. Inshort, lexical chunk is the unity of semantics, grammar and context. They areprefabricated language chunks that can be stored and used directly during the processof language output, which improves accuracy and fluency of English expression andavoids the negative transfer of native language. Due to the significance of lexicalchunks on language output, the author did a research about present situation of lexicalchunks application to English writing in Senior High Schools to find out thesefollowing three questions:(1) What are the significant differences between the compositions of high-scored andthose of low-scored？(2) What kind of lexical chunks are most frequently used in the compositions of high-scored？(3) What kind of lexical chunks are most prone to errors?The study involves748compositions which are from the second-year students of aSenior High School in certain city, Jilin Province. All the English teachers and theauthor collected and marked students’ weekly compositions after a writing test, thetop102compositions are considered as high-scored group, to ensure experimentalvalidity and reliability, the104compositions which rank from450to554are low-scored group. The author uses software AntConc3.2to establish a small corpus and toanalyze present situation of lexical chunks application in Senior High School. ThenExcel Software is applied to analyzing students’ questionnaire, at last, interview iscarried on according to the results of questionnaire. As is found out in this study,compared with the low-scored compositions, the advantages of high-scored lie inthese following aspects: types of lexical chunks are more various and complicated,and compositions are more fluent, natural and accurate. In addition, the research alsofinds that the most frequently in high-scored group is phrasal constraints, and the following are sentence builders, ploywords, and institutionalized expression, on theother hand, the most frequency in low-scored group is also phrasal constraints, on thecontrary, the frequency of these four kinds of lexical chunks is lower than thehigh-scored group. Besides, the most prone to error is sentence builders inhigh-scored as well low-scored.Through this research, the author finds that students’ awareness of lexical chunksis relatively weak, and the majority of senior high school students are not interested inEnglish writing, therefore, the author suggests that lexical chunks should beintroduced to the senior high school English teaching to improve whole level ofEnglish learning, meanwhile, the author also proposes three implications, firstly,teachers should help learners cultivate consciousness of lexical chunks and developthe habit of accumulating lexical chunks. Secondly, teachers should introducedifferent kind of lexical chunks to improve students’ writing ability. Thirdly, sentencebuilders should be taught specifically.