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An Empirical Study on the Application of Lexical Chunks to College English Writing

Author: SunShaoHong
Tutor: XuYingJun
School: Liaoning Normal University
Course: Curriculum and Pedagogy
Keywords: Lexical Chunks Lexical Chunks Instruction Writing Proficiency
CLC: H319
Type: Master's thesis
Year: 2011
Downloads: 118
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Abstract

Developing and enhancing students’writing proficiency in EFL (English as a foreign language) writing is an urgent task for college English teachers. After years of learning, the students with large vocabulary and good command of grammar knowledge have gained comparatively higher cognitive capacity and English competence, but lower writing proficiency. Traditional teaching approach placed too much stress either on grammatical construction or communication functions, both of these can’t help maintain balance state for students, unable students to grasp writing skills. With the fast development of corpus linguistics, lexical approach which is a kind of compromise between structural approach and communicative approach has won more and more attention by researchers. The general principle of the lexical approach is“language consists of grammaticalised lexis--not lexicalised grammar”. (Lewis,1993, 89). In other words: language doesn’t consist of traditional grammar and vocabulary, but grammaticalised prefabricated chunks, grammar is naturally produced during the output of lexical chunks. Formulaic chunks can help ease the burden of grammar and vocabulary processing as well as shorten the gap between the language generation and output of the target language in the mind. Teaching English vocabulary by regarding lexical chunk as a unit should help achieve language fluency, authenticity, accuracy and improve learning efficiency.Based on former research background, the author here apply lexical chunks instructions to English teaching to explores if lexical chunks instructions can improve students’writing proficiency to strengthen the weak links in writing. Hence three research questions are formulated as follows:1. Are there significant differences in students’ writing achievements between the experimental group who are taught by lexical approach and the control group by traditional method after the teaching experiment?2. Is lexical chunks instruction effective in improving students’ English writing ability compared with the traditional methods after the teaching experiment?In order to testify the hypotheses, an experiment was conducted from March, 2010 to June. The experiment involved 60 students from two classes in Dalian Shipping College, 30 students in each class. The two classes were randomly designated one as experimental group and the other as control group. the control group was taught with the traditional teaching method while the experimental group was taught with chunks instruction throughout the term. Before the experiment, there were almost no differences between experimental group and control group in gender age, as well as English-learning experience and proficiency. In the term, 60 students were asked to write two compositions according to the CET-4 writing requirements. SPSS 17.0 was employed to analyze lexical chunks scores of students’ compositions. The results showed that there was no significant difference between the control group and experimental group in the pretest. However, significant difference occurred between the two groups in the posttest. The students in the experimental group achieved greater progress and used more lexical chunks than the students in the control group, As mentioned above, the two groups were under nearly the same conditions except the teaching approach. As a result, we can attribute the significant progress to the lexical chunks instruction. The questionnaire at the end of term suggested that students are fond of this teaching approach. Therefore, we can draw a conclusion that implementing lexical approach can effectively improve college students’writing performance. Finally, suggestions for further research were offered in this thesis. Although there exists some limitations in this study, such as the short period, a small number of participants yet it has yielded some valuable findings which are believed to have greater pedagogical implications and suggestions for further research.

An Empirical Study on the Application of Lexical Chunks to College English Writing

Abstract

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