CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background of the Study
Vocabulary acquisition is vital to second or foreign language learning as it lays thebasis for four skills named listening, speaking, reading and writing during the learningprocess. So it is commonly believed that as far as students can grasp certain amount ofvocabulary, the skills mentioned above might be attained.However, the author, as a teacher of language, has noticed that vocabularyacquisition is the biggest obstacle for students to learn a language. Most studentsconstruct English sentences by doing the patchwork, that is, they find single equivalentwords from Chinese or English to the target language words, and then put them togethermechanically to form a sentence. Thus, the sentences are non-idiomatic andnon-nativelike. What s worse, some students tend to take vocabulary lists or dictionariesof CET-4 to recite. However, they give up gradually because it turns out that theindividual words which they have memorized are easy to be forgotten. Even though theyhave good memories and good command of grammar, their expressions always soundawkward. Thus, it is obvious that only depending on grammar and large amounts ofwords is far from achieving satisfaction.The concept “lexical chunk” was introduced by Becker (1975). Since then, the roleof lexical chunks in language acquisition is drawn attention to by more and morelinguists. One study shows that the proportion of lexical chunks appearing in adult dailycommunication is as high as 70% in a corpus research (Altenberg, 1998). It means thatnative speakers use lexical chunks like “How are you” or “Long time no see” asunanalyzed wholes rather than making the isolated fragments into sentences each timethey talk. As Becker (1975) stated, when people want to express themselves, they extractthe corresponding chunks from their memories, and then process them. These lexicalchunks are pervasive not only in adult language, but also in children s language at a veryearly stage. Peter(1983) claimed that lexical chunks play a very important role in firstlanguage acquisition and second language acquisition.
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1.2 Aims and Significance of the Study
Based on the previous studies, the current study intends to conduct an empirical study on the effect of lexical approach on non-English major students writing. Byadopting Nattinger & DeCarrico (1992) s classification of lexical chunks and lexicalapproach advocated by Lewis (1993;1997), the author uses both quantitative andqualitative methods to find out whether and how lexical approach influences thestudents writing proficiency in detail.The present study is significant theoretically and practically. Theoretically speaking,it enriches the study of lexical approach by taking non-English major students as subjects,which further proves that lexical approach is an effective teaching approach comparedwith the traditional approach. It also elaborates the detailed lexical teaching procedureswhich enrich the way lexical approach is conducted. In a practical view, firstly, the studyprovides a new perspective for language learners so that they can know what lexicalchunk is, understand the significance of it, accumulate the chunks on their own andfinally use English idiomatically. Secondly, the study benefits language teachers as well.They can apply lexical approach in their daily teaching since the effectiveness of theteaching method is demonstrated clearly in the present study. Meanwhile, the teachersare encouraged to work out different ways of teaching based on lexical approach andapply them to class so as to improve the teaching effects.
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CHAPTER TWO LITERATURE REVIEW
2.1 Lexical Chunks
Traditionally, language is believed to be a system of grammar/vocabulary dichotomy.Learning a language means learning grammar and vocabulary separately. As long aspeople have mastered all the linguistic rules and words, they are believed to generatesentences. However, researchers in the last decade challenge