A Study On The Use Of Lexical Chunks In English Writings Of High School Students

As an important way to generate a sentence or a discourse, the use of lexical chunks is a significant criterion for evaluating English writings. Therefore, this thesis attempts to explore the lexical chunks used in 150 English writings of high school students. To be precise, the present study focuses on the two research questions:(1) What are the major differences among the writings in terms of the number and variety of lexical chunks? (2) What are the major errors in using lexical chunks?The following findings are obtained from this study:(1) Students' writing ability is in direct proportion to their ability of using lexical chunks. Among the compositions rated high, middle and low with the requirement of about 150 words, students in high-level group use more lexical chunks than those in middle and low-level groups. To be more specific,82% students in high-level group can use ten to twenty lexical chunks, while 86% students in low-level group can only use less than ten lexical chunks. The number of lexical chunks used in the writings of students in middle-level group is in between. In terms of the variety of lexical chunks, students in high-level group can use more lexical chunks of four kinds (Poly words, Institutionalized words, Phrasal constraints and Sentence builders). Lexical chunks of the same variety appearing more than once are counted as one. (2) The major errors in using lexical chunks mainly fall into 3 categories: Lexical errors, including word-spelling errors and word-collocation errors; Grammatical errors, like the tense and voice errors of verb phrases and the errors of the part of speech of nouns; and Appropriateness errors, typically embodied as logical disorder.The results show that the use of lexical chunks can improve high school students' writing ability, however, students' performance in the number and variety when using chunks is still imbalanced and they tend to make mistakes. Therefore, lexical chunks teaching at present should reinforce and enrich the input and output of lexical chunks, make proper teaching plans catering for different students and combine grammar teaching with situational teaching to help students make less mistakes.