A Survey On The Use Of Lexical Chunks And Lexical Chunk Errors In Senior High School Students’ English Writing

Since "lexical chunks" was proposed by Becker and other scholars in the 1970 s,domestic and foreign scholars have gradually paid more attention to lexical chunks.They have proved the important role of lexical chunks in second language acquisition from different perspectives.Some studies of them have shown that lexical chunks contribute to improving the flexibility,accuracy and fluency of English writing,as well as the quality of English writing.Meanwhile,the content requirements on vocabulary knowledge in high school English courses in the English Curriculum Standards for General High Schools(2017 Edition,2020 Revision)write that "vocabulary teaching in high school not only guides students to understand and use the learned vocabulary more deeply and more widely,but also focuses on cultivating students’ awareness of lexical chunks in the context,further expanding their vocabulary through extensive reading,and improving their ability to accurately understand and express meaning by using vocabulary." Therefore,the importance of lexical chunks in high school English teaching is self-evident.Based on the lexical chunks theory and error analysis theory,especially the classification method of lexical chunks proposed by Michael Lewis and the classification table of verbal errors by Gui Shichun et al.,this study takes senior one students of Zigui County No.1 Senior high school in Yichang City of Hubei Province as an example,and adopts a combination of text analysis method and questionnaire survey method to answer the following three research questions:(1)What is the overall use of lexical chunks in high school students’ English composition?(2)What are the errors in the use of lexical chunks in high school students’ English composition?(3)How is the use of English lexical chunks learning strategies among high school students? 125 practical writing compositions and 216 valid questionnaires are collected,which are calculated manually and statistically analyzed with the help of Excel,SPSS26.0 and Ant Conc4.2.0.After analyzing the data collected in this study,it is found that:(1)Students’ overall use of lexical chunks: The average number and frequency of lexical chunks used in students’ compositions are both high;All four types of lexical chunks are used by students.Among them,collocations are the most used lexical chunks,followed by polywords,sentence frames and heads,and finally institutionalized utterances.(2)Students’ errors in the use of lexical chunks: The proportion of students’ wrong use of four types of lexical chunks in descending order is collocations,sentence frames and heads,institutionalized utterances and poly-words;The common types of lexical chunk errors are morphological errors,verb phrases errors,adjective phrases errors,noun phrases errors,prepositional phrases errors,lexical errors and syntactic errors.(3)Students’ use of lexical chunks learning strategies: Students have a good use of determination strategy,social strategy and cognitive strategy in lexical chunks learning,but their use of memory strategy and metacognitive strategy in lexical chunks learning is not ideal.In short,through text analysis,it is found that the use of lexical chunks in students’ writing is not ideal.Although the number and frequency of the use of lexical chunks are high,the use of sentence frames and heads and institutionalized utterances is less.Moreover,students make lots of mistakes in collocations and sentence frames and heads.Through questionnaire survey,it is found that students’ use of memory strategies and metacognitive strategies for lexical chunks learning is not ideal,which is also one of the reasons for students’ unsatisfactory use of lexical chunks in writing.Based on the above findings,this paper puts forward several suggestions for senior high school English teachers to teach lexical chunks and their application in English writing: broaden the input channels for students’ lexical chunks learning;increase students’ output training of lexical chunks in writing;attach importance to correcting the lexical chunk errors in students’ writing and systematically teach the lexical chunks learning methods and strategies.