Chapter One Introduction
With the globalization of economy and culture, English has become an important tool for self-expression and mutual communication as evidenced by the over 1500 million English speakers globally. In China, English education is paid great attention to all over the country. Students’ academic study is accompanied with English skill training from elementary school to college. In the past, English reading is always the most important skill to students. Although in colleges and universities English writing has become a compulsory course, the teaching of writing still lays emphasis on English vocabulary, grammar and structure, while paying less attention to the practice of writing as a whole including the process of planning, generating and the organization. In the early years of 1980s, English teaching in China focus on the input of grammatical knowledge and reading which results in students’ limited ability in English writing and speaking. Nowadays, with further research of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) and relevant development in theory, the effect of applying lexical chunks in second language teaching has aroused a wide concern. Many linguists and teachers doing research on foreign language teaching are trying to find an effective way to improve students’ foreign language acquisition especially foreign language writing competence via applying lexical chunks. Reciting of the sentence patterns and imitating of English classic model paragraphs have reduced the incidence of syntactic and lexical error in writing, while there still exist some problems in the process of transferring from language input to language output. With the development of cognitive linguistics and modern psychology theories, SLA research has seen a noticeable increase of interest in lexical chunks, thus the approach of employing the lexical chunks to teaching was put forward. The approach of teaching English writing by chunks offers a new way of solving the problems. Since lexical chunks are common in language, it might be assumed that they will naturally and easily be acquired. Many experts and educators have been doing research on lexical chunks, finding that chunks play an important role in our everyday communication, making contributions to the ease, accuracy and fluency in listening, speaking, reading and writing.
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1.1 Research Background
During the middle age of twentieth century, lexical chunks were first proposed by Becker who found that there is a special “multi vocabulary phenomenon” in English. Becker (1975) then first put forward this opinion that lexical chunks are particular multi-words. Nattinger & Decarrico (1992), who also defines lexical chunks as “multi-word lexical phenomena”, argue that these chunks are ready-made multi-word expressions. Many experts and educators have been doing research on lexical chunks, finding that chunks play an important role in our every communication, making contributions to the ease, accuracy and fluency in listening, speaking, reading and writing. What’s more, lexical chunks are an effective way to improve students’ English writing in foreign language acquisition. After that, in 1990s, Lewis pro
