| Lexical chunks are the unity of grammatical rules, semantic meanings and pragmaticcontexts. They have been seen as the average units in English learning and the basis offluent language production. Therefore, with lexical chunks, language production candirectly occur without the process of analyzing their internal structures (Wood,2001). Thus,in recent years, researches based on lexical chunks have become one of the focus topicsamong linguistics and applied linguistics. In China, it mainly involves research in appliedlinguistics and corpus linguistics, and many researchers have done a lot of related studieson lexical chunks. However, some researchers aim at the effect of lexical chunks onstudents’ learning skills, namely, listening, speaking, reading and writing; while othersfocus on the proportion of the lexical chunks. The subjects of these researches range fromhigh school students, college students, and distance-learning students to many others.However, there are a few researches focus on the comparative analysis of the lexicalchunks used by English major and non-English major students. The author believes that itis worth making an overall comparative analysis of the lexical chunks between them.This study takes Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC) as the target data resource,(in which ST3and ST4represent non-English majors from low grade and high graderespectively, while ST5and ST6represent English majors from low grade and high graderespectively), selecting200012words articles randomly from ST3and ST4as the researchdata of non-English major group and200018words from ST5and ST6as the sample ofEnglish major group. With the help of corpus software AntConc and manual selection, theauthor extracts chunks ranging from3to6words to analyze the characteristics anddifferences between non-English majors’ and English majors’ use of lexical chunks. Theresearch questions are as follows:(1) What are the overall characteristics of English major’s and non-English majors’use of lexical chunks? (2) What are the proportion distributions of three categories of lexical chunks in theEnglish majors’ and non-English majors’ writing? Is there any difference between them?(3) As to the different types of lexical chunks, are there any difference betweenEnglish majors’ and non-English majors’ writing in the density and richness of thoselexical chunks?The results are as what follows:(1) Through analyzing the data, the study finds that, for both non-English majors andEnglish majors, three-word chunks are in the largest number and highest frequency,followed by the four-word chunks and five-word chunks, while the six-word chunks arethe fewest. Secondly, in both non-English majors’ composition and English majors’composition, the frequency reduces as the length of lexical chunks increasing and thenumber of lexical chunks is inversely proportional to the length of chunks. To put it inanother way, the longer the lexical chunks are, the fewer the students use.(2) As for the structural types, all the three structural types are included in bothEnglish majors’ and non-English majors’ writings and each structural type of lexicalchunks is frequently used in both non-English majors’ and English majors’ compositions.Among these three types, clausal constituents are in the largest number in the two groups,followed by incomplete phrases and the full clauses are in the last. The result indicates thatthe distribution trend is same as Altenberg’s and Wei Naixing’s research.(3) The third finding is concerned with density and richness of lexical chunk in eachtype. The results indicate that the density of lexical chunks in non-English majors’composition is higher than that of English majors. In other words, non-English majors usemore lexical chunks in composition than English majors. But the difference is notsignificant. While, although non-English major use more lexical chunks, their richness oflexical chunks is lower that that of English majors. That is to say, non-English majorsusually overuse or repeat some lexical chunks in their writings.The present research can enrich the content of studies about lexical chunks and corpuslinguistics. In addition, by answering the above research questions, some inspirations willbe given to the teaching of writing, especially for non-English majors. In the teachingprocess, teachers should pay more attention to the teaching of lexical chunks, providing a rich source of authentic native language, developing students’ awareness of lexical chunkslearning. All of these are beneficial for students to promote their writing skills and improvethe coherence and fluency of their writing. |
