A Study Of Correlation Between College Students’ English Writing Proficiency And The Use Of Prefabricated Chunks

With the development of cognitive linguistics and corpus linguistics, many researches indicate that people intend to use a lot of fixed or semi-fixed prefabricated chunks that have been stored in brain when they are in communication. Prefabricated chunks combine the feature of syntax and lexis, which account for a large amount of natural language. As pre-assembled language is stored in memory, they can be extracted integrally and directly from memory at the time of use, which can alleviate the encoding burden of brain. Lewis(1993), an advocator of chunk-based approach, proposes that “Language consists of grammaticalized lexis rather than lexicalized grammar”. Chunk-based approach breaks the traditional concept of grammar/vocabulary dichotomy and regards prefabricated chunks as the center in foreign language teaching and learning. Prefabricated chunks are the minimum unit in language communication, and the acquisition of language is equal to the acquisition of prefabricated chunks. Chunk-based approach proposes that teachers and students should pay more attention to the accumulation of prefabricated chunks because they can contribute to the fluency and accuracy of language output.Recently, more and more linguists and foreign language teachers both abroad and at home direct their attention to chunk-based approach. Therefore, researches on prefabricated chunks are emerging rapidly; however, most of them are theoretical explanation while the empirical studies are comparatively less. Writing has been regarded as a tough and weak aspect for Chinese students and how to improve students’ writing ability is always the focus of language teaching. Since prefabricated chunks have a positive effect on language output, the author will carry out an empirical study to investigate the correlation between the use of prefabricated chunks and writing proficiency of non-English majors on the basis of previous studies.This empirical research will adopt quantitative method to analyze 118 sophomore students’ questionnaires and their writing tests with the help of SPSS 19.0. All of the participants are non-English majors from Chengdu University of Technology. The questionnaire is mainly designed to learn about the college students’ awareness of prefabricated chunks, their attitude towards chunks learning and the strategies they adopted in chunks learning. And the analysis of students’ compositions in their final tests is used to prove the correlation between the actual use of prefabricated chunks and writing proficiency. The differences in the actual use of prefabricated chunks between high and low grade groups are supposed to be presented also. The focus of this research is presented as follows:(1) To investigate students’ awareness of prefabricated chunks and their attitude towards chunks leaning.(2) To learn about the strategies adopted by students in the process of chunks learning.(3) To show differences in the actual use of prefabricated chunks between students with high scores and low sores.(4) To prove that students with high awareness of prefabricated chunks and positive attitude towards chunks learning can apply more prefabricated chunks and achieve higher writing scores.(5) To find out a correlation exists between the actual use of prefabricated chunks and writing proficiency.The findings of this research can be summarized as follows. First, students’ awareness of prefabricated chunks is high and their attitude towards chunks learning is positive. Second, students’ awareness of prefabricated chunks, their attitude towards chunks learning and the strategies they employed in chunks learning present positive correlation and mutually interact with each other. Third, students with high writing test scores apply more prefabricated chunks than those with low scores in writing. Fourth, students with high awareness of prefabricated chunks and positive attitude towards chunks learning are inclined to apply more prefabricated chunks and achieve higher writing scores. And last, there is a positive correlation between the use of prefabricated chunks and EFL writing proficiency of non-English majors. Finally, the author proposes some suggestions for teaching and learning on the basis of this study.