Chapter 1 Introduction
1.1 The background of the study
As a universal language, English has become increasingly important in our daily life. InEnglish teaching, great importance has been attached to the cultivation of students’ four basicskills: listening, speaking, reading and writing. Among the four skills, listening and readingare input skills, while speaking and writing are output skills. Relatively speaking, output skillsare more difficult than input skills, for students need to possess good language foundations ifthey want to express their ideas accurately and fluently. Writing is of great significance instudents’ language learning. Harmer (2017) points out that writing teaching is important notonly because writing includes reinforcement, language development, and learning style, butalso because the most important is writing as a skill in its own right. Thus we can see thatwriting is an important tool to measure learners’ language competence, which can reflect thelearners’ abilities to use language, to communicate by written discourse and to think logically.Through the writing ability, we can know a learner’s command of grammar, vocabulary andthe ability to think in English. In senior high schools, writing is of great significance becauseit is an important content of English testing. Students must finish the writing section in theNational College Entrance Examination.
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1.2 The purpose and significance of the study
In 1975, Becker put forward the concept Lexical Chunks for the first time, whichindicates the appearance of a new theory – the Lexical Theory. Lexical chunks are consideredas the composites of syntax, semantics and context. Several researchers argue that language isnot lexicalized grammar, but grammaticalized lexis. “Language consists not of traditionalgrammar and vocabulary but often of multi-word prefabricated chunks” (Lewis, 1997, 3).This provides a new sight for language teaching, which is also helpful for English writingteaching. Students can regard them as a whole when they learn lexical chunks so as to reducetheir memory load. Meanwhile, lexical chunks can be extracted directly when needed. In thisway, students do not need to consider much about grammatical rules. Besides, since thelexical are extracted as a whole, the expressions that students adopt can be more in line withthe English language habits, thus reducing the negative transfer of their native language. Inconclusion, in English writing, lexical chunks can not only effectively improve the efficiencyof dealing with the language, but also help make the expressions more fluent, accurate,authentic and logical, which will definitely improve students’ English writing competence.The lexical approach, which is based on the lexical theory, advocates that teachers andstudents should have a strong sense of lexical chunks and increase the productive competenceof lexical chunks.
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Chapter 2 Literature Review
2.1 Lexical chunks
This part mainly talks about the definition of lexical chunks, the classification of lexicalchunks and features of lexical chunks. As for the classification of lexical chunks, this papermainly addresses the classification of Lewis and Nattinger & DeCarrico. The concept of lexical chunks was first put forward by Beck，英语论文题目，英语论文范文
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