A Study Of Lexical Chunks In English Writing By Senior Two Students

Lexical chunk study has been a m ajor concern for lots of linguists and foreign language scholars in recent years. Lexical chunk is a multi-word lexical phenomenon that exists in the communication with high frequency. It usually contains a fixed gramm ar structure, a specific pragm atic environment and a stable collocation of meanings. As a composite of grammar, semantics and pragm atics, lexical chunk s are helpful fo r the development of syntactic rules, helpf ul for learners to achieve a uthenticity and appropriateness of expressions, and also facilitate the learners’ language production.In the light of its important role in language acquisition, it is necessary to conduct researches on lexical chunks. However, most of the present studies on lexical chunks still rest on the theoretical discussion. There are less related studies showing the development of lexical chunk in senior high school,especially, in a Shanbei country town. But second year in high school is a key period in E nglish study fo the students. Thus, it is very important to carry out a study on the use of lexical chunk in their English compositions.The subjects in this thesis are 80 students from a public high school in Yan’an. The author collected 80 useful compositons and questionnaires respectively from two classes. The analysis of questionnaire aim s to know th e attitude of particip ants towards writing and lexical chunk, and its use in their daily st udy. In terms of students’ compositons, the author divide those 80 useful pieces into high-rated ones and low-rated ones. The top 20 compositions are in th e high-rated group an d the last 2 0 compositions are in the low-rated group. Based on the theory of Na ttinger and Decarrico(2000), the author, by making a c ontrastive analysis of lexical c hunks in the h igh-rated and the low-r ated groups, aim to know the frequency of the use of lexical chunks; the proportion and significant difference of four structural categories of lexical chunks in the high-rated and the low-rated compositions.Based on the analysis of questionnaires, it is found that though students think lexical chunk in English learning is very important, the reality is that students rarely have the awareness to make the best use of lexical chun ks in their study. Besides, it is also f ound that the students are not only in lack of motivation for writing, but also have difficulty in writing. Therefore, it is very necessary to make a study on lexical chunks in students’ compositions to put forward som e suggestions for their improvement in writing. T hen, with the an alysis of sample com positions, the high-rated group is significantly higher than that of the low-rated group in the fre quency of the use of lexical chunks, showing that the former group is better than the later group in the capa bility of the use of lexical chunks. However, it is also found that the to tal use of lexical chunks by subjects in the study is much less than that by students in other researches. Obviously, the subjects in this study are relatively weak in English. So students especially those from remote areas should strengthen the practice of lexical chunks. Thirdly, the analysis of the proportion in use of the four types of lexical chunks shows that sentence builders are in the highest use frequency of lexical chunks, which followed by phrasal constraints, poly words and institutionalized expressions. In a word, sentence builders provide support for the whole thesis, so students should make full use of this type of lexical chunks. What’ more, through the T-test, it is concluded that there are s ignificant differences in the sentence builders and phrasal constraints of lexical chunks in the tw o groups, which suggests that these two types of lexical chunks can greatly improve students’ writing levels, so that students should pay m ore attention to the acquisition and application of these two categories of lexical chunks.