A Study Of The Use Of Lexical Chunks In English Writing By Chinese Senior High School Students

Lexical chunk(LC) is a word-unit of two or more words, which semantically and/or syntactically forms a meaningful and inseparable unit. It plays an important role in foreign language learning and teaching.Learning chunk has always been a major focus of high school English learning and teaching. It can not only facilitate the language learning process but also help to improve the accuracy of language use. As an English teacher in high school, however, the researcher often notices that students tend to overuse or misuse some lexical chunks. Lexical chunk learning is far from satisfying in enabling students to express properly in writing. So the aim of this thesis is to find out the features of lexical chunk use of senior high school students and help them to improve their writing.The participants are 56 grade-three students in a senior high school. They are divided into high-score group(H-group) and low-score group(L-group) according to their average writing scores in the last term. In addition, five participants from H-group and five from L-group take part in the follow-up interview.Two research questions are addressed as follows:1. What are the differences and similarities as concerns the use of lexical chunks by students of different writing proficiency levels?2. What are the differences and similarities of the error rate as concerns the use of lexical chunks by students of different writing proficiency levels?The major findings are as follows:Firstly, both high-group and low-group students tend to use verb phrases and set phrases more frequently and sentence builders and connection phrases less frequently. There is a significantly larger frequency gap in the use of sentence builders and connection phrases between the two groups.Secondly, in respect of the error rate of lexical chunk use, the high-group students have a much lower overall error rate than the low-group students. Among the four types of lexical chunks, the largest error rate gap lies in verb phrases, followed by sentence builders.